


In Medias Res

by siempreniall



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: AU, Enemies to Lovers, Kinda, M/M, Stranger Than Fiction, harry is harold, liam is penny, louis is karen, movie adaption, nick is ana, pining to lovers, please check notes for warnings!!!!! there are some very important ones for specific triggers, zayn is professor jules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-25
Updated: 2014-09-25
Packaged: 2018-02-18 19:07:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2359004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siempreniall/pseuds/siempreniall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Styles is an HMRC agent with a penchant for numbers and being alone, who one day wakes up to find a voice inside his head narrating his life. Everything, from falling in love with a lovely (possibly Anarchist) baker to brushing his teeth, is told through the voice of a snarky author who's known for killing off his protagonists, and this time's no different.</p><p>- Stranger Than Fiction AU -</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Medias Res

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: There is a lot of talk in the fic about suicide and major character deaths. If you'd like to know the extent of this (aka if anyone dies) please see the endnotes as that's a very obvious spoiler! If you have any other questions about warnings please let me know in the comments and I'll be sure to get back to you - I don't want anyone getting upset by what they read!
> 
> Anyways, this was intended to be for the Reel 1D ficfest but I ended up finishing it like two months late so that didn't happen as well as it should have, but it's here. This is based on the movie "Stranger Than Fiction", and is a little more Harry-centric than people might expect from me but it's the nature of the movie. I don't think it's a perfect adaption as the movie works best as, well, a movie and not quite as great as a book, but I hope it's still good.

This is a story about a man named Harry Styles. And his wristwatch. In a world full of numbers to be reviewed and equations to run over, he is a man of few words. And his wristwatch says even less. Each day, Harry brushes all of his 32 teeth 76 times. 38 times back and forth, 38 times up and down. Counting each stroke in his head when others usually try to keep the last remnants of their dreams in the minds.

Every week day, for 12 months, Harry pulls a jumper on, instead of the button-down shirt and tie he’d be forced to wear otherwise, saving him 57 seconds each morning that would be spent trying to figure out if his double Windsor looked lopsided or not. His wristwatch thinks a shirt would look more professional, yet says nothing.

Every week day, for 12 months, Harry runs three blocks east and one block south to catch the 259 bus that leaves at 7:49am. His watch enjoys the fresh air and the cool mist that strikes it, reveling in the change of scenery from Harry’s bedside chest.

And every day, for 12 months, Harry makes 38 cups of coffee, prints 56 copies of meeting minutes that would be thrown in the trash later on, and runs seven floors down to the mailroom to personally hand over a parcel that had to be sent out by the next day. He’s a junior assistant for HM Revenue & Customs in London, a position he’s held for the 12 months after graduation. Well, eleven months, two weeks, and three days to be exact. He goes to work each day hoping someone might notice his talent and promote him from the simple tasks he had come to perform to something bigger and better: auditing.

“Harry,” someone says as he rushes through the maze of cubicles on the fifth floor. He spins around, turning to face his boss, Priscilla, standing with Dylan, one of the junior agents he sometimes talked with.

“53 x 32,736?” Dylan asks. He’s looking down at a folder, but Priscilla next to him purses her lips and stares as if he better not get it wrong.

“1,735,008” he answers quickly, glancing over to see a slight smile form on Priscilla’s face. Numbers come to him easily as music come to others, or even cooking. It’s his natural talent.

Dylan writes down the answer in his file, saying thanks to Harry as he turns to walk away. After a few steps he can hear Dylan say, “Told you he was crazy smart,”

He sees Dylan on his coffee break later that day, giving him a little nod as he walks into the break room. All of his coffee breaks last 5.2 minutes (timed by his wristwatch) – the perfect amount of time needed to pour a hot coffee with two creams and one sugar, let it cool down to a palatable temperature, and then drink without much thought put to anything else.

Lunch he eats alone, as well, at precisely 12:45 each day, for 39.6 minutes. Choosing to read the paper or fuck about on his phone rather than talk to the big heads who felt they’re superior to the little assistant with the too-big hair.

And that’s generally how his life goes – more solitude than not. He takes the 259 bus home, alone. He makes dinner, alone. He watches two and a half hours of telly, alone. The collection of friends he had in uni never carried over once he graduated, and it’s harder to meet people when you don’t have the built-in ice breaker of “wasn’t that exam brutal?” Life in London slowly but surely starts to become a sad story of Harry Styles, alone.

So he gets into bed, alone, and set his wristwatch for exactly 6:15am, placing it on the bedside chest as his sole companion for the night.

That is, of course, before Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Harry’s wristwatch changes. Everything.

**

_If anyone were to ask Harry, this Wednesday was like no other. He began it-_

“Hello?” Harry asks, his mouth still full of foam from his toothpaste, on stroke 23 of brushing up and down. Getting no response, Harry shakes his head clear and continues brushing. 24. 25.

_And he began it the same way as each other day, for the past 12 mon-_

He stops brushing again and looks down at his toothbrush, trying to find the source of the voice that seemed to be ringing inside his head. Not saying anything particularly interesting, just… talking about him.

When he doesn’t find where this voice is coming from, he continues brushing.

_He began it the same way as each other day, for the past 12 months. Or rather, the past 11 months, two weeks, and four days. While others spent-_

“Hello, is someone there?” Harry calls out to the (seemingly) empty flat behind him. The voice in his head is high-pitched, more northern. Not his, he knows.

36\. 37. 38.

_While others spent their mornings greeting their significant others with a kiss or planning the exciting day ahead, Harry just counted brush strokes._

“Wait, who just said ‘ _Harry just counted brush strokes_ ’?” he asks, again, to the flat at large. To the small telly in the living room and to the line of jumpers hanging in his closet. To the watch just waking up on his bedside chest. Not to anyone else, not to another person. “And how do you know that I count my brush strokes?”

_It was astonishing how the humble, unassuming-_

The voice continues as he grabs a crimson jumper off the rack. He turns around, hoping to catch the voice in the act. There is, still, nothing there.

He pulls it over his head, smoothing down the wrinkles that fall over it.

_It was incredible how-_

Again, he stops. He checks his watch, tapping on it to simultaneously catch the time and search for a hidden speaker he has never seen. It’s a bit rude to bother it so early.

_It was remarkable how the humble, unassuming day-to-day tasks of Harry’s life, often overlooked, would lead to the start of an entirely new man._

**

 _Harry ran the four blocks it took to reach his bus that morning, crossing over the same crosswalks as always. His stiff leather shoes making a hollow, cold_ clunk _against the pavement with each step._

He stops in the middle of the street, looking down at his feet to see if it’s true. He’s never noticed, really. And because he stopped, for just those 4.8 seconds, he hears the bus doors squeak closed. He looks up, finding the bus ready to pull away, and runs faster. It is of no use, though, as when he reaches the bus, it is already in motion, leaving him to wait for the 8:13 bus with the (also late) woman next to him.

_And though this was an extraordinary day, one that would be remembered far past any other day leading up to this one, Harry just thought it was a Wednesday._

“Excuse me,” Harry asks, turning to the woman at his side, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” she responds curtly with a Scottish accent.

“ _Harry just thought it was a Wednesday_ ,”

“Yes, it’s a Wednesday,”

“No, the voice. Did you hear the voice say that? _Harry just thought it was a Wednesday_ ,”

“Who’s Harry?”

“It’s me, I’m Harry,”

She turns away from him, digging for something in her purse that is probably nothing more than an excuse to not have to speak to him.

“Don’t worry, Harry, it’s a Wednesday,”

**

_That day Harry was incapable of concentrating at work. The coffee orders were mixed up, the meeting minutes printed landscape instead of portrait, an entire box of mail was dropped three stories down the steps as it slipped out of his hands. His mind, it seemed, had been taken over by other thoughts._

“Wait, Harry,” Priscilla stops him, standing outside of her office with two important-looking men, “What’s 48 x 3,702?”

_When Harry’s intimidating boss Priscilla stopped Harry to ask the product of 48 and 3,702. His mind quickly drew a blank, however-_

“Can you please stop talking?” Harry yells to the ceiling, “I can’t concentrate because you can’t stop talking,”

Priscilla’s brows furrow and her perfectly-stained lips purse at that, which is not a good sign. Not a good sign at all.

Quickly, too quickly, Harry answers, “180,406”. The group thanks him, he walks away.

_Despite the answer really being 177,696._

“177,696!” he turns around and yells, “That’s the right answer, excuse me,”

He continues walking on, blushing the entire way back to his small cubicle.

**

Harry’s only kinda-friend catches up with him two hours and 14 minutes later.

“Hey, H” Nick says, walking up to him in the filing room, with his poufy hair and obnoxiously-large mouth, “Jeff just did an audit and found an investment banker trying to claim his daughter’s Lambo as a work vehicle,”

Nick laughs. Harry doesn’t.

“Haz, you okay? That was funny. You always laugh at shit like that,”

“Someone’s following me,” Harry says blankly. Nick pauses, giving him that look he always gives when Harry says something particularly… odd.

“Like, on Twitter?”

“No, like in real life,”

Nick peers around Harry, staring into the rows and rows of filing cabinets behind him. There isn’t another person in sight, not even in earshot.

“There’s no one here, Harry,”

“No, I know,” he replies, shaking his head. He knows he sounds out of it, sounds completely lost and gone, “It’s a voice, not a person. Well, not a person’s body, you know,”

“What?” Nick says. His voice is strained, disbelieving.

“It’s a man’s voice. High, like from up north. But not too north, just a little. More north than here, less north than North, you know,”

“Yeah, makes complete sense,”

“No, listen, Nick. He’s saying like… he’s narrating me. Talking about everything I do,”

“Oh, okay,” he replies, like it makes sense, “No offense, but what is he narrating? You’re just standing in the basement of the most boring office building in London… staring at files,”

“No, no. I’ve stopped filing and he stopped narrating,”

“So he’s narrating every boring thing you do in your life?”

“Just, watch, Nick,” he says as he puts another file into its place. Just as he thought, the voice starts again.

_With every brush of the manila folder against the grey, cardboard box, Harry was reminded of the sound of a bed sheet billowing through the air. It reminded him of laying on his mother’s bed, toes curled and eyes wide in excitement._

He adds another file, and another, and the voice just continues.

 _Of the stark white of her bed sheet resting against his face, before she would be pull it off and parachute it over his body. Of the look on her face of pure love, the smell in her bed of home. Slowly she would lay the sheet over him again, asking where he’d gone with a giggle before counting_ 1, 2, 3 _and lifting it up again._

“Did you hear that?” he asks, after he feels The Voice’s paragraph is done.

Nick’s face searches his for a moment, his goofy grin from a minute before gone, and a concerned scowl stretched in its place.

“What, do you mean the sound of you filing?”

“No,” Harry huffs, “The person talking,”

“Harry, I’m sorry, but the only two people I’ve heard say anything since I came into the room are you and me,”

“It’s funny,” he says, staring off as he starts to wonder how you can tell if you’ve lost your mind, “but it really does remind me of sheets,”

“What ‘it’ are you talking about, mate?”

Harry’s about to answer Nick, but the sound of heels clacking on the tile floors snap Harry back to reality. He glances over to find a woman in a smart pencil skirt and turtleneck walking towards them. She’s Marcie, Priscilla’s assistant, and she rarely leaves her perch outside of Priscilla’s door.

“Harry, you’re wanted upstairs,” she says as she comes to a halt in front of the two of them. “Priscilla’s up in her office,”

“Ooh, someone’s a big shot, in’t he?” Nick says, his eyebrows raised until he looks like a caricature of himself.

A meeting with Priscilla is usually daunting, but with the added fact that Harry’s been acting strange that day, he’s terrified. As he walks towards the elevators he imagines every possible nightmare that could behold him in Priscilla’s big, fancy office with the beautiful views down the London skyline. He watches the floor the elevator’s on slowly descend. 10. 9. 8.

Possibly a firing. Maybe he’s been demoted? He can’t imagine what’s below his current job. Janitor? Can you be demoted to janitor? The anxiety eats at him, and continues that way as he enters the elevator that makes its way to the top.

Priscilla welcomes him into her office with a surprisingly warm smile. He takes a seat in front of her desk and waits for the guillotine to chop. Even more surprisingly, it doesn’t come.

“You’ve been on audits with Dylan, correct?” she asks. She’s put on a pair of reading glasses and sifts through a pile of papers on her desk.

“Yes, I’ve gone to a few. Most recently, one two weeks back where we helped find that a law company in Islington has been withholding funds for years,”

“I remember that one, yes. And I remember that Dylan said specifically that you broke the case wide open. Is this also correct?”

“I believe so. I’m sorry, did I make a mistake on it?” Harry asks. He feels like he’s in the head master’s office, and she’s sweetening him up before laying on the demerits.

“No, Harry, I’m actually incredibly impressed. Dylan in particular has been singing your praises. Seems to think your talents are being wasted on coffee cups and in filing cabinets. Would you agree?”

“Well, I did go to school and get excellent marks. I’m quite good at math and have an eye for detail. It’s always been my dream to be able to do what Dylan does,”

Priscilla laughs, “No one dreams of being an auditor, Harry,”

He laughs too, but doesn’t quite agree.

“Basically, Harry, what I’m trying to ask is if you feel quite prepared to do an audit on your own,”

Harry’s eyes bug out of his head. It’s surprising as hell, and he honestly wonders if this is what The Voice was talking about that morning.

“I mean,” he stutters, drawing in a quick breath, “Do you?”

“Harry, you wouldn’t be in my office if I didn’t have faith in you. I’ve see you in action with numbers, Dylan’s seen you in action with audits. You don’t seem to really have a problem, do you?”

“No, ma’am, I guess I don’t,”

“If your first audit goes well, which I’m sure it will, then we’ll set up a promotion for you. Do you think that sounds fair?”

“More than! I’m just, I’m very excited!”

“Oh, Harry,” she laughs, “No one’s ever excited to audit,”

Once again, Harry has to politely disagree.

“Alright then, let’s see what audits we have today,” she says, shoving a stack of files aside and pulling another one to the center of her desk, “We seem to have a baker and a securities trader,” she motions to two files, one small and neat and the other nearly three inches thick.

“I’ll um, take the small one, if that’s alright,”

She hands it over, the file feeling important in his hands, “Of course, wouldn’t want to kill you on your first day,”

**

It is, in fact, not as easy as expected.

Harry assumed it would be a mom and pop shop, maybe specializing in wedding cakes. Or muffins. Someone who would feed him sweets after he was done. He assumed they’d be welcoming, even if he was an auditor, and try and make his first audit as smooth as possible. He never expected Niall.

“Damn it!” Niall yells, “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

Harry’s just introduced himself, and it’s going not quite as well as planned. Niall, a 20-something blonde with nice skin and a cute bakery, is making bread. Well, if pounding a mound of uncooked dough into a counter counts as baking. Which it very well might. Harry hasn’t worked at a bakery a day in his life.

“I understand that undergoing an audit may be stressful, Mr. Horan, but I assure you-”

It seems as though Niall doesn’t care to listen, though. Instead he prefers to throw the dough across the counter with such force that it knocks over a stack of rolling pins.

“Listen, fucking Tax Man,” Niall says, bringing his voice down low. “Get. Bent,”

On the few audits Harry has tagged along on, none of the shop owners have seemed so… erratic. Of course they were all annoyed, all pissed off. But he distinctly remembers that any mounds of dough firmly stayed in their place. And, really, he wishes he hadn’t come here. He wonders if maybe he should have picked the large file and impressed Priscilla. It may have even been easier than this.

The few customers in the joint seem to not mind. They all eat their croissants slathered in jam without turning an eye towards the commotion, or sip their coffee and continue their conversations as if Harry had never entered the place. In fact, once Niall says ‘tax man’, they all seem to perk to life.

“Tax man?” they scream, as if the disdain for him is universal. Which, alright, it may be. But it’s still rude. They continue to boo him anyways, no matter how tacky Harry’s wristwatch may think it to be.

“Is there anywhere else we can talk about this?” Harry asks as soon as the peanut gallery quiets down. He specifically remembers Dylan telling him to try and pull one person aside to talk to them calmly and without embarrassment. It doesn’t seem like Niall embarrasses easy, though.

“No, actually,” Niall says with a smile sweeter than the jars of jam by the door, “We can talk about anything you want. Right. Here,”

“Well, Mr. Horan, it seems that you didn’t pay all of your taxes for the last year,”

“I seem to think that’s correct,”

“78%, to be exact,”

“Yep,” Niall says, enunciating the ‘p’ with an extra pop.

“So that was intentional?” Harry asks a little incredulously. He couldn’t imagine someone would do that on purpose. No one _wants_ to get audited, right?

“Yep,” Niall repeats.

“So you must have been expecting me to be here, then. An audit is the correct action to take,”

Niall looks like he’s about to answer, but a buzzer in the back rings and he heads to an oven to take out a tray of rolls with a smile on his face. He has a nice smile, Harry thinks, but he wishes it would look a little less intentionally evil.

“I wouldn’t say I was expecting an audit, no. Maybe a fine or a scolding,”

“Scolding? Mr. Horan, this isn’t primary school, this is the government. And you’ve just stolen from them,”

“It’s not stealing. I just didn’t pay everything,”

“Well, people who don’t pay everything get audited, Mr. Horan,”

“Well, Mr. Styles, that’s only if I acknowledge that you have the right to audit me,”

“I am standing here, in your bakery, to audit you. I’ll need to go over your past three years’ returns to see if you owe any more money. Is that alright?”

“No,” Niall says sternly, and with a bit more of an Irish lilt, “It’s actually not! Look, Mr. Styles, I’m really not a bad guy. I… fucking love taxes. I support schools and better access to healthcare and fitness programs, but this country spends a ridiculous amount of money on things it doesn’t need. And since my voice in the poll booth seems to be equal to approximately nothing, I decided to just pay for what _I_ thought our country needed,”

“You can’t just do that, that’s anarchy. Is that what you’d like to do, Mr. Horan, overthrow the government?”

“Ha!” Niall laughs, his snark returning, “What a gigantic fucking step to make in your head, mate,”

Niall steps back to a mound of bread dough, kneading it and hitting it repeatedly with a rolling pin. Harry doesn’t mind that Niall has moved to ignore him, rather he _thought of his long fingers pushed confidently into the dough, firm yet soft. How his arms stretched to the top racks, his feet tapping on the tile floor to the catchy beat playing from the portable radio._

_The broad expanse of his shoulders, painted with freckles and a slight tinge of sunburn, laying on the cool grass of a summer’s evening. His neck, long and pale, covered in marks he wouldn’t want to hide. A shock of blonde hair against Harry’s pillow, shiny pink lips, blushed cheeks. Bright, blue eyes, staring back at him from just centimeters away._

“What are you looking at?” Niall asks briskly. Harry hadn’t noticed he was staring, or that his heart rate had sped up at the thought of bringing Niall home with him.

“It’s um,” he stutters, trying to find the words that are forced back into his throat. He gulps.

“You were staring at me with your mouth all agape like a porno,”

“I wasn’t. I wouldn’t do that. It’s… horrible. Unprofessional, is what it is. But, it’s not what I was doing, was it?”

Harry finally chances a look up to Niall, to find his face a cross between angry and mystified.

“In any event, I need to leave now,” he starts to pack his things, rushedly and fumbly, “Something has just… come up. Right now. But I’ll be back, on Tuesday, to get this audit done. I look forward to it, and I hope we can together on better terms,”

He hurries out of the door, not turning to look back and face the scowl that he’s sure adorns Niall’s face.

_Harry finally found himself angry, at himself and at his circumstances, outside the bricked bakery._

“Shut up!” he yells. He drops his suitcase to the sidewalk beneath his feet and bellows at the sky, hoping that whoever the hell won’t stop talking will finally be able to hear him, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

_He cursed to the heavens, wondering why he always found himself in such tragic circumstances._

“No I’m not! I’m cursing you, and God wouldn’t have a fucking Northern accent, either!”

**

Thirteen stories up, a man stands teetering on the edge of his office building terrace. The streets of London aren’t yet busy below. A few cars pass, as do some pedestrians. Laughing with their loved ones or joking by themselves. Pushing prams or talking on cellphones. A small child on a bike turns a corner too fast, she runs into a man carrying a box of papers that fly in the air as soon as he tries to dodge the little accident. He likes the way they float.

They pay no attention to him, his wavering stance or the cigarette perched between his lips. He takes a drag and extends his hand, feeling the cool mist burning away from the sun touch his hand for the last time.

He stubs his smoke out in a wet tissue and places it in his pocket, closing his eyes to feel the wind brush against his cheeks. Slowly, he lifts a foot over the edge. Thirteen stories. One-hundred thirty feet. Forty meters. 223 steps. One more step, and he tumbles over the edge. The mist staining his skin, the wind burning his descent down. Three seconds.

“Excuse me,” a rough voice says. Louis knows there’s someone else there, but refuses to acknowledge it. Instead focusing on the hand stretched out in front of him, peering out through the window 13 floors up, and a meter from the wooden floor below.

“Excuse me,” he hears again, “Are you Mr. Tomlinson?”

Louis turns to face a man in the doorway. He’s broad in his nice suit, cleanly shaven but with a bit of boyhood left in his cheeks. Louis knows who he is; doesn’t like him already.

“Yes,” he finally responds.

“Great. What are you doing?”

He looks down. It might look odd, to someone not a writer, to see a fully-grown man of twenty-something years old perched on a desk with his hands out in front of him, as if he’s trying to summon ghouls or practice air-bending. “It’s research,”

“Am I interrupting?”

“Of course,”

“Sorry. I’m Liam Payne. Your publishing company sent me to assist you as you write your latest novel,”

“Ah. So you’re the spy,”

“Assistant,”

“Spy,”

“For a writer, you seem to have a horrible grasp on words,” that shuts Louis up, “I’ll be everything to you that a secretary would to anyone else,”

“I don’t need a secretary,”

“Do you need a spy?”

Finally, Louis cracks a smile.

“Listen,” this man – Liam – continues, “Whether or not you want me here, I’m supposed to stay until you’ve finished this bloody masterpiece or the company drops you. You can utilize me, or I can read the Sun and drink my coffee and get paid twenty pounds an hour for what I normally do at home for free. Which will it be?”

“Nothing against you, Lime, but I don’t need a cheerleader just because some old farts across town think I’ve got writer’s block,”

“Do you have writer’s block?”

There’s no good response to that, so Louis just turns his back to him, “What are your thoughts on leaping off a building?”

That certainly jolts Liam awake.

“I try not to think about it, really,”

“Why not?”

“I try to think about nice things. You know: dogs, stuffed animals, laughter,”

“Everyone thinks about leaping off of buildings-”

“Everyone minus one, apparently,”

Slowly, Louis lowers himself until he can plop down and sit cross-legged on the desk’s surface. It’s more papers than desk, now, and they’re not even from his manuscript. They’re letters from fans. Long-time and new. Young and old. Some are typed, others handwritten. Others, even, are just pictures drawn on computer paper. They’re all silly; Louis doesn’t read letters.

“Jumping off a building would be a way to go, wouldn’t it?” he continues, “All your life, even if you’re not afraid of heights, you’re weary of them. You won’t go beyond a certain step of the ladder without someone to hold it, and you peer with uneasy eyes over the second floor of a shopping mall. You’re taught of gravity. It’s unforgiving, constant, relatively a mystery to us, yet it surrounds us. Still, one day you wake up and realize that it’s the way out. The pavement below is an escape. The one fear you’ve had all your life, that’s plagued you on rollercoasters and airplanes, is the final frontier. The meters between you and impact, the mist that still lingers from a cold night, once a nightmare and a mystery, make sense finally. Isn’t that poetic?”

Liam doesn’t respond, looks like he wants to call 999 actually, so Louis continues.

“I don’t know how to kill Harry Styles. And that’s why you’re here,”

“I can help you kill him,”

“How the hell are you supposed to help me? You’ve never even… _considered_ jumping off a building. You call yourself an ‘assistant’, yet I have no clue how a glorified secretary is supposed to help me with the most important kill of my entire career,”

“I understand,” Liam tries to console him. To no avail, of course, but an effort none-the-less.

“Do you? I can’t just… no matter how beautiful it would be to have his pale body lying on the cracked street below, I can’t just bloody throw the man off a building. His death needs significance. How are you, a simple _secretary_ supposed to find that for me?”

That makes Liam mad, apparently, as Louis sees his fingers clench around the strap of his leather shoulder bag.

“Listen to me. I’ve been doing this longer than you probably care to think. I’ve helped ten authors release some of the world’s best-selling books. Whether the problem was where to end a love triangle or how to bloody start the thing, I’ve been there, and I haven’t missed a deadline. I’ve never gone back to my bosses to ask for more time, and I’m not starting now. You have me at your beck and call. Whatever you need, tell me, and I’ll help. Within reason; I’ll not actually kill someone as part of your odd research. Your books are great, Mr. Tomlinson. I’ve read them all, I’ve enjoyed them immensely, but you’re stuck. It happens. Get over your ego, and ask me to help. I have rules: I won’t bury a body and I won’t buy you anything illegal. But, I will gladly help you kill this son-of-a-bitch, so help me God,”

**

Later that evening, Harry waits outside his office for the bus to take him home. After the events of the afternoon, it’s been rather peaceful back in his little workspace. He has told no one of the events that had occurred between him and Mr. Horan. Half of embarrassment, half because he was sure he’d be pulled from the audit. Instead, he got roped into a session with the wack job from HR. They talked about feelings, about loneliness, and used as many euphemisms and metaphors for “voices in heads” as probably exist in the English language. So now he’s late for his ride home, and consequently waits for the 6:55 bus. With the other businessmen from his building who stay too late on a regular schedule, with nice suits and nicer haircuts, and no voices ringing in their heads.

And it’s then, a minute and thirteen seconds before his bus is due to arrive, that his watch goes on the fritz.

_Harry had assumed it was just working improperly, and never even put a thought to the clever little machine attached to his wrist, and that it may be trying to tell him something. It knew few words, though it honestly wished Harry would pay it more attention. All he ever wanted was the time, when his watch had so much more to offer. Harry didn’t care, just banged his finger against the face and turned its knobs, hoping something would set it straight._

It’s hard for Harry to concentrate on getting his (until now, reliable) watch to work again with that damn voice ringing through his ears.

_And finally, it was on this Wednesday, on the side of a busy road with men he didn’t care for, that the one constant in his life suddenly… stopped._

He pulls the watch off his wrist with a small sigh, smoothing over its glassy surface with the pad of his thumb as a sort of apology for getting annoyed with it, then turns to the pack next to him to ask for the time.

“Ehm,” a short man next to him starts, peering down at his own wrist, “I have 6:57,”

“Thanks,” Harry replies curtly, resetting his watch to the time given.

_Thus, Harry (with help from his watch) unknowingly had steered his life into a new direction, towards adventure and life and fate. But little did he know, that this seemingly menial, everyday, boring task, would result in his impending death._

“Wait,” Harry shoots his head up, because he has to have misheard The Voice on that last one. Though It has always been clear as day in his ears, as if Harry listens to it through headphones.

He stutters through guttural noises and tries to find the words, “Wait, wait, wait. Are you kidding me? Hey! Talk to me! What do you mean ‘impending death’?”

The other men around him start to stare at him now, which he would normally be concerned about, except they all work on different floors than him and, frankly, his _impending death_ is a tad more important.

Per usual, though, no one responds to his calls. The men next to him don’t, and neither does a disembodied Yorkshire (yes, _Yorkshire_ ) accent. “When? How soon is impending?” he asks, all but lost to staring up into the sky and yelling, even as the bus pulls up in front of him, ready to take him home.

He begrudgingly boards without an answer, finding a seat easily enough considering no one wants to sit near the weirdo who has _issues_ with the sky.

**

As soon as he gets back to his flat, Harry quickly unlocks the door and runs into the entryway with about as much rage as he can muster, which, admittedly, is not a lot.

“Where the hell are you?” he yells, ripping through the books on his shelves and looking for a mic or a speaker or anything that would suggest his home was bugged. He checks behind decorative pillows he’s never moved, under the rug beneath the coffee table, and even in the broom closet. Nothing is there, nothing out of the ordinary at least.

He grabs his toothbrush, forcing toothpaste onto it and shoving it into his mouth with unnecessary force.

“Harry brushed his teeth 36 times up and down,” he repeats, foam flying out of his mouth while he tries to brush and speak at the same time.

It’s fruitless, though, as no voice breaks through to remind Harry of his daily hygiene habits. There are no voices at all, at a time when he needs them the most. Because up until this point The Voice has been an endlessly annoying yet harmlessly passive addition to his life. The most It has done is make people think Harry has gone insane and affect his ability to do mental math, but now that It is threatening his life, he knows something has to be done. What has to be done, though, is the question.

“Here!” he yells, storming back into his room and picking up a lamp, “Harry stormed into his soft bedroom, picking up the nearest item and smashing it into the wall,”

He pretends to hit the wall with the lamp, refusing to do so as he specifically remembers it costing 30 quid and he is not about to lose his mind and part of a paycheck at the same time.

“Then he switched directions!” he yells, his voice becoming more frantic, “Running to the other side of his room and upending all his possessions along the way,”

He continues on, turning his room over and narrating himself along the way, ending his raid at his mirror where he stands in silence and stares at himself. He offers no more narration, and The Voice doesn’t pick up where he left off. Instead, he just looks over the features of his face: the blown-wide eyes, the quivering lip, the permanent wrinkle in his forehead. He looks pale, he looks tired, he looks _sick_.

**

Which is, inexplicably, how he ends up sitting on a stiff wooden chair in the hallway of a uni building a few minutes from his office.

He went to see a psychiatrist, a lovely lady with calming incense in her waiting room and a wonderful propensity to _insist_ he has schizophrenia. And no matter how hard and long he tried to convince her he didn’t have it (that he was not being talked to, just talked about), she spent an equal amount of time trying to convince him that the best course of action would be a delightful regimen of medications. Still, he had to decline, and the doctor had given him one more idea to take hold of and run with.

“Well, Mr. Styles, if you’re so convinced that this is, remarkably, a narrative, then perhaps you’d be better off consulting a literature specialist,” she commented before looking down at her notebook and scribbling something angrily.

And he was sure then, and still now, that she was taking the piss out of him, but considering nothing else in his life had been going normal, what was one more abnormal event to add onto everything else?

He felt silly calling up UCL and asking who he could best ask a literature question to. Half expecting the intern who answered to direct him towards Google, he was pleasantly surprised when she began asking about which literature in particular he wanted to learn about more.

“Modern,” he said easily, “Modern British literature, if that’s a thing, please?”

It took a few seconds for the girl to work her magic, but she finally came through with a name and an email address, Harry jotting them both down quickly and eagerly. Sending the guy off a short email, he explained his predicament as easily as he could and asked if they could meet for lunch or something. In return, he got an office number (#213, Armsby building), a time (3:45pm) and a wish well.

By the time he gets to the campus early and makes his way over to the meeting point, Harry hasn’t got a clue what to expect. He doesn’t know what the guy looks like, whether or not he’ll be nice, or even if he’s just agreeing to meet with him in order to have a fun story to tell all of his pupils. But Harry’s desperate, and if this doctor fellow’s gonna give him the time of day, well the least he can do is be optimistic.

Harry doesn’t expect Zayn, though. Well, he expects a man named Dr. Zayn Malik, but he doesn’t expect a good-looking guy with tattoos inked up and down his arms and with a face that hardly looks older than Harry’s. But.

“You must be Harry,” he says, extending his hand for Harry to shake from his seat, “Sorry I’m late, had to lash it out with a student after class. Kids are getting mouthy these days,”

Harry just nods, but stands up when Dr. Malik starts unlocking the doors and follows him into the cramped and dreary office.

“So, you’ve got your own personal narrator, eh?” he says, laying his bag down on his desk and pulling an array of novels and writing pads from it.

“Yes, that’s correct,”

“And this narrator says you’re going to die?”

Harry nods again.

“How long do you have?”

“I don’t know; It didn’t say,”

“Ah,” Dr. Malik stops, an odd grin creeping across his face, “Dramatic irony, always fucks you over. Anyways, do any of your family members hear this?”

“I don’t have any family,”

“A lover?”

“None of that,”

“Your friends?”

“None of those either anymore, well, I guess Nick from work. He doesn’t hear It though,”

“What does your narrator say?”

“I don’t know,” Harry pushes a hand through his hair in frustration, because this is going _nowhere_ , “normal narrator things? He talk-”

“So It’s a he?” Zayn interrupts.

“Yes,”

“And you recognize the voice?”

“No, I’ve never heard it before; just know that it’s Yorkshire,”

Dr. Malik thinks something over, before turning to face Harry looking sorry like he’s expected him to all along.

“And what makes this voice so special, Harry? What makes it not…”

“Schizophrenia?” Harry finishes. Dr. Malik nods and Harry gulps down the anxiety that’s been settling in him.

“Well, Dr. Malik,”

“Please, call me Zayn. You’re not a student,”

“Okay, Zayn, It’s been right about things before, like how I feel about work,”

“Everybody hates work. It doesn’t take an author to tell you that,”

“I know, it sounds crazy, why do you think I’m coming all the way here to ask you about it,”

“I just don’t think I can help you, Harry,” Zayn says, and he honestly seems sad about it, which makes Harry at least feel a little bit better, “I don’t have job security yet and I’m teaching five classes for the first time. I don’t have enough room in my schedule to try and figure out something with you that honestly sounds like work for a medical professional. I’d help you if I could, I really would, but I’m an expert in literature. And frankly, this sounds nothing like it. There’s no plot, no offense, and nothing besides a voice in your head to make you think otherwise,”

“I know, and I didn’t mind it before when It was just telling me what was happening in my day-to-day life, things I already knew. But once It mentioned death… I freaked out. I still remember what It said, clearly: _little did he know, that this seemingly menial, everyday-”_

“What did you say?” Zayn asks quickly, cutting Harry off and looking genuinely interested for the first time, “Rather, did The Voice really say ‘little did he know’?”

“Yes, those were Its exact words,”

“Little did he know,” Zayn repeats with a small laugh, “I wrote my doctoral thesis on ‘little did he know’. I’ve had long, drawn-out, drunk discussions with friends about ‘little did he know’. It means you don’t know something that someone else does, and it undeniably is a phrase only really used… in fiction,”

Zayn taps out a small song on his chin, staring over posters on his wall. And for his part, Harry is tired and sore. He can feel his eyes drooping already, and if Zayn refuses to help him well then he’s just going to go home and…

“Can we meet on Monday?” Zayn looks over, silent when he doesn’t get an answer, “No, you could be dead by Monday. How about tomorrow? At 9:45? I don’t have class until 11 tomorrow,”

“Sorry, what?” Harry shakes his head, trying to figure out if The Voice has been missing with his hearing, “Ten seconds ago you thought I was a lunatic with a lost cause,”

“A lot can change in ten seconds. I’m sure ten seconds before The Voice started its rampage on your life you thought you were the only person with access to your brain. And now look at you, everything’s all mixed up,”

Harry, for his part, feels disassociated and exasperated, but he agrees anyways.

“9:45 it is,”

**

It’s on the bus home that The Voice finally returns

_Harry was deep in thought. The stretch of Tollington Road by Emirates Stadium, that he drove on every single work day for eleven months, three weeks, and two days-_

Harry decides that if he’s going to do this, if he’s going to get to the bottom of this voice, that he has to start doing some work on his own. He quickly dives into his shoulder bag and drags out a notepad and pen, jotting down the words that swim through his brain.

_-had suddenly made the precision, consistency, and security of the numbers and equations he ran through his head daily fade away. In its place, entered Niall Horan._

Harry’s head snaps up at the sound of Niall’s name. And, sure enough, he walks onto the bus, a neutral expression painted in lovely hues of pink and white across his face. That is, until he sees Harry.

“Oh shit,” he mutters as soon as he looks up from his phone to see Harry, awkwardly, waving at him.

“Mr. Horan!” Harry continues, though he still gets no good response from Niall, “I’m Harry Styles from the HMRC,”

Niall pays no attention to him, just walks to the back of the bus where plenty of people are already standing, oddly enough. It doesn’t seem to bother him any, as he just stands with the rest of them.

“Hi,” Niall says finally, offering back the weakest wave and fakest smile imaginable.

“Would you like a seat?” Harry offers, moving his bag from the spot next to him.

“Nope, I’m good, thanks,”

“But there are seven seats open,”

Niall hardly suppresses a laugh at that, “I don’t care,”

The bus lurches forward then and sends Niall tumbling from his standing place at a pole into a seat conveniently close to Harry’s. He looks like he’s about to be adamant and stand up, returning to a spot where he doesn’t have to be so close to Harry, but he decides against it at the last moment and shoves his rucksack into the seat next to his.

Harry chances a look over at him unnoticed, which isn’t that hard considering Niall stares off into every direction that isn’t Harry’s. He’s got bright blue eyes, which Harry noticed before, but there are specks of green in them, too, that are only noticeable when the sunlight comes through the window and hits his irises just right. And he’s got a pretty smile, too, one that resides on his face even when he doesn’t think about it, permanent and etched into his skin just like the tattoos that cover Harry’s body. It’s probably a bit insane that Harry feels this way about a man he’s just met, especially considering they only talked for ten minutes and most of that was Niall either yelling at or ignoring him. Still, stranger things have been happening.

“How are you?” Harry starts, and finally Niall looks straight at him.

“Not that well, if I’m being honest. ‘ve got a creepy tax man breathing down my neck, don’t I?”

It’s meant to be rude but there’s not too much bite to it considering Niall says it with a smile.

“I’m sorry about that,” Harry winces, “About the creepiness, not the audit. That’s your own fault, honestly. But truly, I apologize for how I acted around you. They teach us a lot in school, but you can’t teach manners, and that’s my own shortcoming. I’m sorry I st-stared at you,”

Niall smiles more, always smiling, before nodding, “Okay, apology accepted,”

And, well, that went easier than Harry thought it would.

“But only because you stammered,”

After a few moments of blissed silence, where Niall stares out the window and Harry counts his lucky stars that Niall won’t complain to his superiors, Harry speaks again.

“You ride this bus often? I’ve never seen you here,”

“Nope. Would usually just walk, but I’m running late,”

“Ah,” Harry nods, “Late to an Anarchy support group?”

Harry braces himself for his joke to go badly, for Niall to scoff or roll his eyes. Instead, he gets a small grin and a breathy laugh.

“No, actually,” Niall leans forward, resting his forearms on the seat in front of him so Harry can hear him clearer, “I’ve got my Tinhat Society bakeoff to get to. It’s open to everyone, want to come?”

“’M sorry, can’t,” Harry laughs, “Just ate a snack before I left work, I’m full,”

Niall laughs and Harry likes how his face looks when he does it. The dimple that forms on his chin, and the small one on his cheek that tries to match. The way his eyes crinkle, how his nose goes more taut, the straight edge of his jaw and pale column of his neck looking stronger and more lean. Likes the way the sound resonates in his chest, too.

_With little else to do, besides stare at Niall, which had obviously gone so well the other day, Harry nervously tried to make small talk._

“You’ve got… really straight teeth,”

 _Really small talk_.

“Thanks,” Niall bares them, indulging in how bad Harry was at seemingly all easy communication, “Just got the braces off a couple’a months ago. They were a pain in the arse but 100% worth it, can smile now without feeling like I’m thirteen,”

_Harry sat there and in his head calculated the likelihood that he would make an ass out of himself the longer he stayed on the bus. So as it pulled up to a line of houses he passed every day, he-_

“This is my stop,”

He grabs his things hurriedly, pulling himself out of his seat and smiling at Niall as he stands up, leaving Niall with a small “see you soon,” and receiving just a dull smile in return.

 _As he stepped off the bus and started walking down the street, Harry was surprised at how flirty he had been, and even more surprised at how well it had gone. So surprised, in fact, that it took him 35 steps to realize that he had gotten off the bus 12 stops early_ -

Harry looked up to see the bus pull away, and sure enough he was farther away from home than expected.

 _-and would now have to walk all the rest of the way. Alone_.

**

Louis hates the rain. It messes up his hair and gets in his eyes when he walks outside, he has to close all the windows in his flat or it’ll flood, and it just turns all of the city into a grey, dreary mess every time it downpours. Luckily enough he lives in London, where it’s just considered a fact of everyday life.

What he hates most, though, is driving in it. London traffic is already horrific enough without the constant pressure of slippery roads and drop-filled windshields to make it worse. He’s late to lunch with a friend, no, a work meeting, as he drives over the Vauxhall Bridge. All of the other drivers around him he can predict – their movements and their stupidities. He can account for their mistakes, but he fails to notice the small child on a bike, riding too close to the road for comfort, when she finally loses control and spins into Louis’s lane. Louis avoids the child, swerving out of the road and over the edge of the bridge, crushing through the barriers and sailing over the edge towards the murky, brown depths of the Thames below. He braces himself for the crash, nothing left to do but wait for chills and loneliness of an empty car filling with water to seal him up.

“How are we killing Harry today?” Liam asks next to him.

Liam’s brought an umbrella big enough for two, but Louis sits out in the rain without so much as a rain jacket to cover himself. Not that Liam won’t share, Liam _loves_ sharing, but Louis finds that research is best done when fully immersed in the environment being studied.

“Car accident,” Louis says plainly, “Crash over the bridge, into the water. Did you know that cars can float on water for between 30 seconds and two minutes? Not if they… not if they land on their tops, though,”

“And we have to be out in the rain to do this research?”

Louis huffs, “What other way is there?”

It’s quiet for a few, blessed moments as Louis studies the cars passing over the bridge. Traffic is heavier than what’s normal for this time what with the rain and everyone going slow, trying not to take the route that Louis is trying so hard to plan for his beloved protagonist.

“Have you been doing the other things I’ve said to try?” Liam asks suddenly, “I know for a fact that my other authors have seen great results from just doing a bit of wordplay or reacquainting themselves with the language they’re having issue with,”

“It’s not the language that’s the problem,” Louis says through gritted teeth, “English isn’t stopping me from killing Harry, Liam, I just haven’t found the right direction to go in,”

“Maybe Harry could die from pneumonia, considering that’s what you’re about to get sitting out here sopping wet and chilled to the bone,”

Louis is quiet for a few moments, and Liam begins to think he’s won before Louis starts speaking again.

“But, Liam, how would he _catch_ pneumonia? I can’t just give him a terminal illness without a meaning, without a cause, without some sort of factor that says Harry Styles died of this horrible, drowning condition _because_ ,”

“I’m just trying to keep you alive, is all,”

“I’m not in the business of saving my life,” Louis starts, taking a cigarette out of his pocket and hiding it his jacket until he can stumble upon his lighter, “I can only take away others’. S’all I’m good at,”

**

Harry counts 98 tiles on the ceiling of Zayn’s office by the time he’s done with his questions. They’ve ranged from the odd (“Do you feel as if you have any new magical powers?”) to the odder (“How in control of your hubris are you?”) to the oddest (“What’s your favorite rhetorical device?”). They didn’t make any sense to Harry, and Zayn wasn’t putting any effort towards explaining himself, and all he can feel is relief when Zayn finally says “That’s probably it,”

He walks over to his desk and files the questionnaire away, leaving Harry to sit alone on the chair with only the rain lashing against the office windows there to break the silence.

“So what’re your ambitions in life?” he asks as he slides the files around. The sound is familiar, comforting, “I never really got a good sense of that in all my questions,”

“Um, well, I’m not quite sure,” Harry answers truthfully. There’re a lot of things he wants before he dies – a promotion, a love of his life, a family, a home – but they’re not his ambitions. He hasn’t really thought of anything that’s missing from his life, really, besides. Well. The one thing.

“I’ve always wanted my life to be more musical, you know?”

“What, like people walking down the streets snapping their fingers in preparation for a interfamily fight?”

“No, not theatre, just music. I’ve always liked singing, I think I’m good at it if I’m trying not to brag, but I’ve never gone anywhere with it. I was in band when I was younger but we sucked and besides a few Battle of the Band type deals, nothing really came out of it besides a few broken friendships,”

“What would you have done differently?”

“For starters, I always wanted to learn to play the guitar. My mate, Matt, was the guitarist, and he always told me he’d show me how to do it. But then Matt’s girlfriend cheated on him with our drummer and our band fell to shit and nothing ever happened there. I went off to uni, made different friends, and had no one left to teach me,”

“Interesting,” Zayn notes before returning to his spot in his chair in front of Harry, “All that’s left to do, really, is for us to figure out if this is a tragedy or a comedy. All literature, much like life, ends in two ways: life continuing on, or it ending as simply as it started. Basically, either you get married or you die. Romantic, no?”

“How would I do that, though? How would I figure out where this is going?”

“In romantic stories, the person the protagonist falls in love with is usually introduced after the work begins, and usually the relationship is formed on some sort of hatred. Though, Harry, I can’t really imagine someone hating you,”

“Don’t know if you’ve forgotten, Zayn, but I work for the HMRC. There aren’t too many people that like me, I think,”

“Well, that’s promising. Anyone in particular, that you’ve met since the Voice started, that you think might fit this well?”

It’s not hard for Harry’s mind to jump straight to Niall. Though, to be fair to his mind, it’s been jumping to Niall a lot the past few days.

“There’s one person, a baker, who I’ve got to audit. He caught me staring at him, it wasn’t pretty. Well, _he_ was pretty, just not the situation,”

“Hmm,” Zayn stops, thinking over it like Niall is the most important part of the equation, “I like the sounds of that. Work on it,”

Harry nods, though he has no clue what it means to ‘work on it’ or what he’ll do or how he can ever get Niall to not loathe the sight of him.

**

The bakery is busy when Harry enters it just a half hour later. Niall is helping a customer and telling another employee what to do, and Harry doesn’t want to interrupt so he stands by the door and waits for a lull, but it doesn’t take long for Niall to notice a lanky man in a too-small business suit standing awkwardly by the door.

“Mr. Styles!” he says loudly, a smile spread across his face. Harry can’t decide if it’s genuine or mocking, “You’re here early! Am I the sole lucky boy who gets to enjoy your presence today?”

Harry takes a second to pull out a notebook from his pocket and mark down a strike under the word “comedy”.

“Yes, just you. It shouldn’t take all day, though. I just need enough time to figure out if 22% is all you owe,”

Niall finishes with the customer but refuses to stand still, going to pull a tray of buns out of the oven instead.

“I won’t be paying it either way,”

“Well, we need to know for, you know,” he clears his throat with a gruff cough, “tax purposes, and such,”

He doesn’t respond again, so that’s a strike for _tragedy_.

“You know, you don’t need to call me Mr. Styles. Harry will do just fine, I don’t want you thinking I’m trying to be all high and mighty over you,”

“I know. Don’t care,”

 _Tragedy_.

“Whatcha got there?” Niall asks, nodding to the notebook in Harry’s hands.

“Nothing,” he replies defensively. He pulls it around his back to hide it from Niall’s view, like if it’s out of sight Niall will forget it exists in a second, “Anyways, why don’t we get started. The sooner you get me all the receipts and documents I’ll need, the sooner I can get out of your bakery,”

Niall smiles, and he has _got_ to stop doing that because it throws Harry’s stomach through a loop every time he does, and leads him up the back stairs.

Harry sets his bag down on a small table sitting like an island among racks of flour and mixing bowls and a few odds and ends that found their way onto the shelves. He sits down and starts organizing everything he’ll need, and really it can’t take that long. It’s not that big of a business so he should probably be out in a few hours. Then Niall comes back and heaves a large, cardboard box filled to the brim with stray papers. So. Maybe not just a few hours.

“What’s that?” Harry asks. Well, screeches. It’s kinda hard to hide the squeak at the end.

“My taxes,” Niall smirks.

“Are you usually this…”

“Awful? No. I’m actually quite neat and tidy with my paperwork. This is just for you,”

He pats the box, giving it a warm farewell, then returns down the stairs.

 _Tragedy_.

**

The rest of the day passes as uneventfully as an audit usually does. Harry sits alone in the little attic room above the bakery and looks over number after number after number after number. It all fits. Though he had been worried before about doing his first solo audit, and really, the choice of auditee had not been ideal, it all was coming naturally to him. As naturally as numbers always have. Niall, though, doesn’t want to help at all.

He returns back up the stairs to grab some bags of sugar, and when Harry offers help Niall just struggles back down in silence.

 _Tragedy_.

When Harry needs clarification on if a number is a 0 or a 9, he’s met with Niall talking to a customer and no words in his direction. He decides it’s a 0.

 _Tragedy_.

A homeless man makes his way up the stairs to use the bathroom. He talks at Harry about prime numbers for five minutes before spilling a cup of coffee over a stack of papers.

 _Comedy_.

When he eats lunch, he finds himself staring at Niall for at least five minutes. Distracted by how warm and familiar he is with each customer, the small dimple molded into his cheek, his smile. And Harry doesn’t know how to categorize that – that feeling of being completely enamored with someone who hates your guts. His wristwatch recommends “tragicomedy”, but, of course, Harry doesn’t listen.

**

He finishes up, finally, at seven to nine. The sky outside has already turned dark and the rain batters against the windows. It hasn’t let up all day; Harry would know. He packs up his bag, ready to finish things up when he gets back to the office, and starts heading back downstairs. His stomach grumbles and his mind wanders to the leftovers waiting in his fridge when he comes face to face with Niall again.

He’s moving a batch of fresh biscuits from the baking sheet to a plate, too consumed by his work to notice Harry’s finally finished. They smell delicious, for what it’s worth. Chocolatey and sweet, just like his mum used to make. 

“Would you like a biscuit?” Niall asks, looking up at him (and acknowledging him) for the first time in hours.

“No, that’s quite alright,” Harry says quickly, though he’s honestly starving and their aroma almost literally pulls him closer to the kitchen.

“Come on. Just one,”

“I can’t,” Harry says, wracking his brain for a lie to get him out of explaining why he can’t eat a simple biscuit, “I hate sweets,”

Niall stops at that, completely just stops. His left hand lingers in midair, the spatula that once held a biscuit quickly clatters to the pan below.

“What did you say?” Niall says incredulously. He looks angrier than Harry’s ever seen him. Which is amazing, considering he just got audited, “Who the _fuck_ doesn’t like sweets?”

“It’s just… I’m trying to stay healthy, you know?” He hopes that Niall misses the quiver in his voice and how he grabs his bag a little tighter at that.

“Look at you!” Niall nearly yells, “You’re perfectly fit! You can eat one sweet and not completely turn yourself fat. I saw your lunch, it was full of… green shit. Like _kale_ and _quinoa_ ,”

“Quinoa’s not a veg; it’s a grain,”

“I don’t care! Sit down,” Niall commands, a little unexpectedly. “You’re not leaving this shop until you have a goddamn biscuit,”

Harry wants to protest and go out into the rain and return home to eat some leftover marguerite pizza, but there are two things he can’t resist in this world and they’re apparently Niall and a plate of biscuits.

He grabs a table in the middle of the store and waits awkwardly for Niall to return with biscuits that he is sure includes some kind of spit or poison (or both). After he’s put them down, Niall takes the seat across from him and looks at him expectantly, his chin resting in his hand as he stares deep into Harry’s eyes.

“It’s been a long day,” he reasons, rubbing a (large) hand over the stubble on his face, “I know it was, it was by design. But just eat the biscuit and I promise everything will feel better, yeah?”

Harry wants to turn away with empty hands and an empty stomach, but he swears to God that Niall is batting his eyelashes at him and they just smell so _good_ that he ends up dipping it in milk and taking a bite anyways.

He closes his eyes as he takes it all in. The biscuits are warm, straight out of the oven, with a gooey center and a bit of a kick that he can’t quite place. They remind him of his mother, of her and his sister baking them on snow days and refusing to share them until he shoveled the drive. They remind him of surprises in school lunches and tins filled to the brim with piles and piles of biscuits, waiting for relatives to devour them at Christmas.

“Good, right?” he hears, finally opening his eyes to see that Niall’s still staring at him. He nods, and Niall continues.

“I experimented so much with these when I first opened the shop. Anyone can do chocolate chip biscuits, but not everyone can do chocolate chip biscuits that you actually _remember_ , that you actually return to a bakery for again and again. I worked on it for weeks, selling the rejects for half price, until I finally figured it out. A dash of cinnamon, a pinch of ground pepper, and you’ve got yourself a sweet that adults cry over,”

It’s the first time that Niall’s said anything to him that didn’t have to do with anarchy or hating Harry’s pervy guts. And it makes Harry wonder about Niall, about his friends and his family and his life. Where his parents are and why he knows how to bake so well. He thinks that maybe Niall even loves to bake more than anything in the world, that maybe he didn’t decide what to do in life based on what modules he was good at in grade eight.

“It was a really good biscuit,” Harry reaffirms, taking another bite and really waiting for the hint of pepper to drop in, cinnamon following closely after, “Delightfully delicious, wonderfully warm, you know the deal,”

When he’s done with the biscuit, picking a crumb or two to stick in his mouth just because he can, Niall takes the plate and returns to the tray to portion more onto it.

“So…” Harry starts, because he hasn’t got a clue if Niall wants him to stay or leave or what, “Have you been baking all your life?”

“Close to it!” Niall laughs, “But I only started taking it seriously in uni,”

“Cookery school?”

“No, Trinity College, actually,”

“Oh,” _Oh._

“No, don’t worry about it. I was studying to become an actuarial scientist because I loved the mixture of the hardness of numbers, how a two is always a two and you can never explain yourself into a solution it just always _is_ , with the cold morbidity of death. I mean, there are other things you can study besides death, it just happens to be the coolest. Did you know you have a greater chance of being killed in an accident as a pedestrian than as a bus occupant, but only slightly so?”

Niall comes back to the table with two more biscuits on the plate, motioning for Harry to eat them with his head. He shouldn’t, there are a million reasons why Harry shouldn’t, but he picks one up and eats it anyways, much to Niall’s satisfaction.

“In my final year I was in this study group for one of my classes, and every session I would bake something to bring to my mates. Raspberry muffins, zucchini bread, snickerdoodles. It really helped me relieve stress, you know? Then word got out and our group grew, and with each new member I tried to come up with better recipe - blueberry scones with lemon glaze, hot chocolate soufflés, Bailey’s cupcakes with mint icing – until I graduated with an average GPA, a degree I didn’t want, and a brain full of recipes just waiting to be tried,”

Harry can’t imagine a world where Niall’s stuck behind a desk, listing off the ways someone can die and how likely it would be. He can’t imagine his sunny grin revealing such morbid facts on a daily basis, or his bright hair holding back thoughts so dreary. The bakery is more fitting, he thinks. What could be better than Niall’s cheery disposition greeting you as you walk through the door, lemon bars in hand.

“I really did enjoy the biscuits,” Harry says, because he feels like he has to make it up to Niall. For being a dick and auditing him and staring too long at his face sometimes.

“I’m glad,”

“Thank you for not letting me not eat them,”

Niall laughs, “Anytime,”

And then they stare at each for ten whole seconds, during which time Harry forgets to breathe three times, before he’s startled back to reality.

“Ah, Christ,” he glances at his watch, though he _knows_ the time, “I really need to leave, it’s getting late,”

Niall stands up from the table too quickly and bumps it, a little bit of nervous energy stuck in his fingers. “Of course, yeah! You’ll take some biscuits home?” He’s already dishing them onto the plate when Harry finds his voice again.

“I can’t! I’m sorry, I just can’t,”

“Listen, bro, if this is a health thing then I can assure you that you won’t lose 1/6ths of your abs just by taking a few biscuits home, okay?”

“No, it’s not that. It could just be considered a bribe is all. I really shouldn’t even have had the ones I did back there,”

Niall stares at him all slack jaw again, which Harry really wishes he would stop doing because he’s sure he’s speaking perfectly good English.

“I’m not gonna tell anyone, Harry. For fuck’s sake, I wanted to give you a hard time not get you fired. No one else is gonna know, so just take the goddamn biscuits,”

“It’s against the rules at my company. I’m really sorry, I just can’t. I could buy them! If I buy them then there’s no question, yeah?”

Niall just shakes his head, shoving the jug of milk back into the fridge and stomping around, “Just fucking go home,”

Everything’s gone _wrong_. He’s finally figured Niall out and had a conversation with him that lasted more than two minutes and that actually went somewhere. They were getting along, Niall didn’t hate his guts, he was doing everything right. And then the realization dawns on him, that Niall’s shop closed at five and there is no reason for him to be baking biscuits that would have to be thrown out overnight.

“You made them just for me,” he whispers, “You were just trying to be nice, weren’t you?”

Niall averts his eyes, a small blush creeping across his face, “Just go home, Harry,”

Harry deserves this, probably, but it still doesn’t lessen the sting.

“I know you don’t know what this means,” he says, taking the notebook out of his pocket and adding another tick to an already full page, “but I think my life’s a tragedy,”

**

“Tragedy,” Harry says firmly when Zayn comes into view outside his office. He’s carrying a coffee the size of his hand and looks like death. 8am is not his primetime, apparently.

“What?” he asks, his voice barely squeaking through, as he tries to unlock his door.

“I tried yesterday to get the baker to like me, to at least not hate me. It was going well for a little bit, then I decided to fuck it all up, apparently,”

“Interesting,” Zayn notes as he finally jiggles the doorknob enough to let them in, “Well, this is good news, then,”

“My tragedy is good news?”

“No, not that,” he waves his hand, “Well, kinda. This entire time the narrator has only been saying what you’ve already done. Even if it was only two seconds before, he said what you did because you did it first. You’ve got autonomy, kid. Use it to your advantage,”

“What should I do then?”

Zayn gulps down a huge portion of his coffee, closing his eyes as the steam reinvigorates his sparkling brown eyes, “Nothing,”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Do nothing. Your plot is moving forward because you’re putting it into motion. By doing nothing, _nothing_ , there is no plot. Instead, the plot will find you,”

“What does… nothing consist of?”

“Don’t do anything worth a word in a book. Don’t go to work, just call off sick. Just sit in your flat in the same spot and _do nothing_. Don’t even fucking brush your teeth, because apparently it’s so interesting when you do that,”

 _Nothing_. Harry can do that.

**

“An _excavator_?”

“Yes, Zayn, a fucking excavator!”

Harry’s standing in the middle of Zayn’s office covered in dust with a knot in his stomach that just won’t leave. It’s getting a little late now, he’s sure that most professors don’t have to stay this late on a normal evening, but most professors don’t almost get perfect-strangers killed, either.

“Wait, hold up, you can’t start a story in the middle of the plot. Start from the beginning,”

“I did what you fucking told me to. I woke up this morning, on the couch so I wouldn’t even have to _move_ then proceeded to do nothing. I watched the David Attenborough specials I had fallen asleep with last night, I ate a breakfast of crackers that I had laid there the night before, and I didn’t even brush my fucking teeth. My mouth feels disgusting, Zayn. I pissed in a bottle, for fuck’s sake!”

“Well, then how did you fuck it up?”

“I didn’t! I didn’t do shit, literally!”

“That’s an improper use of ‘literally’,”

“I don’t care!”

“Fine, whatever, continue,”

“Then, the phone rings. I ignore it. _Ring_. Ignore. _Ring_. Ignore. _Ring._ Ignore. It finally stops when I get my mail, I ignore that too, and the phone starts up again. _Ring._ Ignore. _Ring_. Ignore. _Ring._ Ignore. Then my watch goes fucking bonkers and starts pointing at the corner of my reception room, when suddenly there’s a fucking excavator claw in my flat!”

“Was it there for any good reason?”

“They got the wrong flat block! They were supposed to be tearing down one two blocks over! Who the fuck gets that wrong?”

“Someone who’s stuck in a plot,” Zayn says quietly. Almost so quietly that Harry misses it, but not enough.

“Did you say plot? I’m just asking cos I’ve been thinking and it sounds more like a coincidence, right?”

“A coincidence would be craving steak all day and going home to find your mum’s made a nice rib eye. This isn’t a coincidence, Harry, I wouldn’t even say it’s plot! I don’t know what this is,”

“Then what do I do?”

Zayn’s quiet for a moment, leaning back in his desk chair and staring up at the 98 tiles on his ceiling. He’s always been a bit too eager to help Harry with his issue, like he never truly believed it existed. He always acted like he was just helping some loon have a spot of fun for a few days. Now, as the realization dawns on him that something greater is at work, for the first time Zayn looks serious, and it absolutely scares the shit out of Harry.

“You’re not in control of your destiny, Harry,”

He nods, “I know,”

“I have nothing else for you to do and I have no way to control this. Neither do you. It’s a train barreling towards us but we don’t know when the impact will come. It’s horrible, it’s a surprise, and I’m sorry. But I can’t tell you anything else,”

Harry’s known from the beginning, when the voice started and foretold his death, that there was nothing for him to do. If this voice is real, and he’s never been so sure in his life that it is, then how is he going to stop a faceless narrator from continuing his story? All plots in literature move forward without any knowledge on the part of the protagonist, why would Harry get to be any different.

“So I have to die?” he asks, small and lost.

“Unless the plot changes drastically soon, I really believe so,”

“And you have nothing left for me to do?”

“All I can say is just live your life,”

“But that’s what I’m doing!” Harry yells. And he doesn’t mean to, especially because none of this is Zayn’s fault. If anything, he should be thanking the man for giving him a moment of his rare time in the pursuit of an impossible ending. Still, “I’m just trying to live. I’m just trying to survive the week! How do I do it?”

“That’s not what I mean, Harry. Live your life like you really want to live it. Take time off of work, eat foods you thought you’d die before you’d try, or just do nothing if that’s what you want. Be the Harry you had always wanted to see in the mirror as you counted your brushstrokes,”

“That’s the problem, Zayn. I haven’t a clue of what that is,”

**

Nick welcomes him with open arms into his flat. The construction company agrees to pay for the renovation (and rebuilding) of Harry’s flat, but it’ll probably last weeks. He could be dead by then. Instead of trying to live by himself in a place he can’t even call home, he drags a suitcase to Nick’s flat and tries to make it passable.

It’s not the worse living situation, really. Nick’s got a pretty big place with a second bedroom that’s been empty since his roomie skipped town. He hasn’t been able to find another renter ever since and he seems to enjoy Harry’s company enough. There’s an issue with his fascination with a certain boyband that was put together on the X Factor, but he’ll ignore the numerous posters hanging on the wall and the cutout of Jerry Lyles in the bathroom if it means he has someone to eat chicken parm with.

On their first night together, as Nick serves up their dinner and pours him a glass of wine into a cup with teenaged boys’ clean-shaven faces on it, Harry decides he needs to make a decision. Of whether or not he’ll continue his life as normal, sitting at his desk and waiting for his death to come with another audit from Priscilla, or whether, for once, he’ll try and spearhead his own plot.

“Nick, can I ask you a kind of strange, existential question?”

“Sure, but do you mind if I answer with my mouth full?”

“Go for it. Really, just, if you knew you were going to die, like, near in time, what would you do?”

“How much money do I got?” he asks with spaghetti hanging out of the corners of his mouth.

“I don’t know, how much money do you got now?”

He swallows, “Gotcha… easy. I’d get tickets to go see Both Ways in concert, for like every single show. I’d just follow them around ‘til I die,”

“Aren’t you too old for that band?” Harry laughs.

“That’s the beauty in music, young Harold, is that you never really outgrow it, do you?”

**

It’s later that night, as he brushes his teeth in a bathroom that’s too small and too white to pass for his own, that Harry comes upon the greatest realization of his life. During brush 19 of left to right, it becomes clear to him that he doesn’t _have to_. He doesn’t have to do anything, really. He doesn’t have to go to work or worry about Niall or wear a wristwatch. He doesn’t have to go out in the rain if he doesn’t feel like getting wet, and he doesn’t have to bring an umbrella if he _does_ feel like getting wet. He doesn’t even have to count his brushstrokes. 38 times back and forth. 38 times up and down.

**

 _Harry found his “Both Ways concert” in the form of a guitar shop in Camden. On the four walls of Guzzly’s Guitars were 160 guitars, 95 of which were electric. They were of varying colors, shapes, sizes, and ages, and Harry did not know what to do about a single one of them. He needed a guitar that defined him, a guitar that he got for a_ reason _, not just because it could play some notes. There are 2,341 playable chords on a guitar, and each one would be as sufficient as the rest in getting them out. But not nearly all of them would do._

_Some were too odd, others too plain. A few on the back wall looked so intimidating he didn’t even want to stand near them, and others looked more fitting for his 8-year-old cousin who had finally upgraded from PlaySkool electronics. Others had price tags so high he nearly choked when he saw them. And then there was the one._

_A candy apple red Gibson guitar hung on the wall in the back of the store, close to the intimidating ones but not close enough to be hindered by their influence. It was perfect for reasons Harry couldn’t explain. But the way it stared him down, motioning for him to come closer with the gleam of its body from the overhead lights and the sleek line of its neck. He’d never seen something so beautiful, so crucial to his future, in all of his life._

**

“What are we doing here?”

Liam’s been asking that question a lot lately, and honestly shouldn’t he _know_ by now that Louis works best in unusual environments.

“You told me I needed visual stimuli, Liam, and now you have a problem with your own advice?”

“I was thinking a museum, maybe a film festival. I didn’t mean the A&E at the Royal London Hospital,”

Louis eyes an ailing man on a gurney as it passes by, “Should’ve specified, then,”

It’s hectic in here, and it’s quite possible they’re not supposed to be standing to the side as actual people with actual maladies wait for care. No one notices them, though, and thus no one says anything.

“What about him,” Liam points at a man wailing, half hidden by a curtain, “Any inspiration in him?”

“He looks like he’s suffering from appendicitis with the way he’s holding his side. Harry can’t die from appendicitis, that’s _dumb_ ,”

Liam rolls his eyes (a habit he’s been picking up from Louis), “You’re sure not offering anything better,”

“We’re narrowing down the field, shut up. Appendicitis is too boring, he’s got the wrong parts for a childbirth gone wrong, too young for a stroke, wrong career field for a construction accident. Why did I have to make him an HMRC agent? What’s someone in there gonna die from? A paper cut? Boredom?”

“I don’t know? People hate auditors. Maybe someone has it out for him?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Liam. No one could ever want to hurt Harry,”

“Except you,”

“But that’s my _job_. I don’t want to hurt him, just kill him. Wait, shit, that’s it! These people are all in the hospital but they’re _okay_. I don’t need someone who’s going to survive, I need someone on death’s doorstep,”

He rushes over to a nurse who looks overworked and underpaid, surprising her with his excitement.

“Ma’am, where do you keep the deathly ill people?”

“The what?”

“You know, the ones on the ventilators and the beep beep heart machines. People who aren’t going to survive the week, where are they?”

She stares him down for a few moments. In her line of work she’s likely to see loads of real weirdos every day, but Louis’s always been a bit unique.

“Sir, are you alright? Do you need help?”

Louis laughs, “Why, do you treat writer’s block here?”

**

_The Gibson felt perfect perched in Harry’s lap. All the times before when he had tried to learn, guitars had felt intimidating and unnecessarily heavy. Now, as he skimmed his fingers over the red body and plucked mindlessly at the perfectly-wound strings, it all felt right._

_Priscilla had given him time off work for “mental health”. Word had gotten around the office about the voices in his head, and with the added stress of a half-demolished flat on his plate the company had been a little more than lenient about his vacation than usual. He supposed it really didn’t matter; he could quit or get fired for all he cared._

_Slowly but surely he built himself up through the ranks of amateur, mediocre guitar skills. His stubborn, forced chords from the first time he sat down in front of a Youtube video grew confident and precise after hours and hours of practice. It was this guitar, the little hunk of wood, plastic, and metal, that was finally giving him the peace and resolve he had always searched for. In place of feeling stuck in a rut so that eventually, a few or ten years down the line, he could lead a life that was ‘okay’, he was actively trying to better the one he had in the moment._

_He didn’t eat alone, didn’t count his steps as he walked, didn’t worry about the amount of brushstrokes he used while cleaning his teeth (nor their direction). Instead of monologues in his head as he placidly accepted his boring nights, now he had someone to talk to and play with through the wee hours of the morning. Numbers had always been so right in his head, the finite infinity of their existence, but there was something to say about a little bit of human comfort._

_There was still something missing, though, and he felt it everywhere. There was an emptiness that followed him around, when he walked through the shopping center with bags in both hands and no one by his side, when he stared at his phone and realized he had no one left to call, when he went to bed under foreign sheets and felt the missing body next to him as if it actually existed. The guitar under his hands felt right, but sometimes he wished it was another person’s hand held in his own, or their hair as he stroked over it lovingly on the plush sofa. All it took was his wristwatch, illuminating an audit file on his nightstand, for him to realize what was left._

**

Niall is just locking the bakery as Harry turns the street corner. It’s hotter out than usual and Harry can feel the sweat making his stomach stick to his t-shirt where the cardboard box is pushed up against it. When he sees that Niall is about to leave, Harry takes off running and yells his name. He’s sure he looks insane, but it quite fits the circumstances he’s found himself in.

“Mr. Styles?” Niall says, his eyes wide in surprise and with no hint of a smile anywhere close to his face.

“Hi,” Harry says back, a little out of breath, in equal parts because of the running and his nerves, “I’ve just caught you!”

“You have! Care to tell me why?”

“I need to tell you something?”

“I’m not stopping you. Go ahead,”

Harry sighs and takes a deep breath, the package in his hands feeling heavier and heavier by the second. He just prays to God he can get his words out without forgetting everything he wants to say or just dropping the box on Niall’s toes.

“I’ve been a complete and utter shithead,” _great start_ , “I’ve ogled you and insulted your gifts by trying to buy them. I’ve made you feel uncomfortable and fucking… audited you. And I’m sorry, I really am. Although, to be fair, the auditing thing was my job and you deserved it. It’s just… you make me weak,”

Niall startles to life at that and looks as if he’s about to say something, but Harry’s on a roll and there’s no stopping him now.

“I spend all of my time near you trying to figure out how I can better myself to be worthy of you. You are passionate and well-spoken and fucking… fit. Shit, I shouldn’t have said that, but you are, so please take it as a compliment,”

“I do,”

“Great. I messed up any sort of even decent relationship from the get-go, not because of my job, but because I made you feel uncomfortable, and I promise it was truly a mistake, I would never-”

“Please!” Niall interrupts, “Please let it go. I was not offended then, I am not offended now, that you stared at me for ten seconds. It’s okay. I only gave you shit because you were an auditor and I wanted to make you sweat. I don’t mind being told I’m fit. It’s quite nice, actually, especially after spending quite a few years in my teens looking like a short, awkward ten-year-old. Continue, just with fewer apologies, please,”

“I want you,” Harry blurts out before he can stop himself, “I want you to tell me everything about you because you make every story sound entertaining and you give your all to everything you do. You have the brightest eyes I’ve ever seen and the most infectious smile, they distract me every time but I never want to look away. And, fuck, you’re a great baker. Those were honestly the best biscuits I’ve had in a while and I really didn’t care about my health. I’d eat a thousand of those puppies if you kept putting them on a plate,”

After he’s done, nodding at himself in conclusion, Niall just stares in silence. After a few seconds, Harry starts planning which part of his decree he’ll take back first, but then Niall finally speaks up.

“What are those?” he asks, gesturing towards the box in Harry’s hands that’s full of individual brown paper bags.

“I brought you,” Harry clears his throat again, it’s just so damn dry, “I brought you flours,”

Niall stares down at the little packs of powder like it’s simultaneously the worst and greatest joke he’s ever heard. Finally, the ends of his mouth quirk into a small grin.

“Do you mind bringing them a few more blocks?”

**

Niall’s home is small but vibrant, bits and pieces of his life stuck in every nook and cranny he could find. It’s impeccably organized, which Harry could have guessed from the way he keeps his shop, but not sterile like or impersonal like the homes Harry sometimes sees in magazines or on TV. Pictures of loved ones adorn the walls, along with posters of Irish bands and a tricolor that (unsurprisingly) takes up half the entryway. It smells like cinnamon and butter and Harry’s can hardly remember a time that he’s been happier than now, with a plate of half-eaten lemon meringue pie on a plate in front of him and a smiling Niall sitting across the table.

It was a shock when Niall invited Harry back to his place, an awkward few minutes as they waited at the bus stop together with seemingly little to say. On the dimmed ride, past 11 stops, Harry counted five times that Niall tried to sneak a glance at him, and it absolutely turned something in his stomach. And when they reached Niall’s stoop, Harry nearly dropped the box of flour on Niall’s foot when he invited him in. Luckily, though, the baking goods made their way safely to the kitchen pantry, and everything after that’s been easy.

Two hours after he stopped in front Niall’s bakery with an armful of puns, Harry finally feels relaxed. A fresh latte sits warm in his belly and Niall’s laugh sits light in his chest.

“I’m gonna go clean up the dishes,” Niall says quickly after Harry’s done with the story of the excavator invasion in his flat, “If you wanna go rest on the sofa I’ll be out in a second,”

Niall’s invitation and smile are earnest, and he seems no closer to asking Harry to leave than Harry is to leaving of his own accord, so he walks easily into the other room confident and happy that he’s still here. It’s getting late and Nick’s probably wondering where he is, and he probably wouldn’t even guess if he tried all night. And honestly, the day before, Harry wouldn’t have either.

Niall’s living room reminds Harry of Niall himself the second he walks in. Tiny and comfortable, it seemed as if every part held a story; from the hole in the wall to a plush ram on the bookcase. What draws his attention first, though, is the guitar leaning against the window.

“You play?” he calls back to Niall.

“Play what?”

“The guitar!”

Niall pops his head in through the kitchen archway with a furrowed brow, “Oh, yeah, do you?”

“Oh, I mean, not really. I’ve just dabbled in it, really,”

“I could teach you!” Niall yells as he walks back to the sink, “I love teaching other people to play. Being able to make your own music is something we take advantage of, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Harry replies mindlessly as he runs his finger over the eight strings. He doesn’t know many songs, only bits and pieces of a few, but as he thinks it over he can’t find one good reason why he couldn’t try one song. If there was anyone this would work in front of, it would be Niall. He hopes.

With unsteady hands he takes a seat on the sofa and grabs the guitar, closes his eyes, and strums the first chord before he takes a second thought.

“ _Come up to meet you, tell you I’m sorry, you don’t know how lovely you are,_ ”

Okay, good, for once his voice is holding out and his hands are solid and he will woo the shit out of Niall with goddamn Coldplay if it kills him.

“ _I had to find you, tell you I need you, tell you I’ll set you apart_ ,”

Harry can feel the cushion next to him dip as he assumes Niall takes a seat, without a word.

“ _Tell me your secrets and ask me your questions, oh let’s go back to the start_ ,”

He clears his throat because it’s gone dry in a split second, but he can finish without mucking it up, he knows he can.

“ _Running in circles, coming in tails, heads on a science apart_ ,”

He lets the last note run long before he finally opens his eyes, finding Niall sitting next to him with a look of shock on his face. He puts the guitar aside and is about to talk his way out of what just happened in embarrassment before Niall is taking his head between his hands and kissing him without pause.

Kissing Niall is everything Harry’s ever thought it’d be in the distressing amount of time he’s spent thinking about it. Niall’s energetic and enthusiastic, climbing into Harry’s lap quickly and without asking. Not that Harry’d say no. His lips are soft and his hands are strong, holding him around his shoulders to move him into the kiss he wants.

“Off,” Niall says as he pulls away from Harry’s lips. Harry’s still trying to catch his breath and his thoughts so he absolutely no idea what Niall means until he can feel hands digging under his shirt and it clicks. He lifts his arms so Niall can pull the shirt off of, and as soon as it’s gone Niall just can’t shut up.

“Holy shit,” he says under his breath, as if Harry isn’t supposed to hear, “God, you’re fucking hot. I’ve been trying to imagine what’s under that dull pullover of yours and… Jesus Christ, my bedroom’s down the hall,”

Niall pushes himself off of Harry and drags him along, alternating kisses with making sure they’re not backing into any walls or expensive pieces of baking equipment in the kitchen. Harry manages to get Niall’s flannel and undershirt off on the way, a feat he’s silently proud of.

When they finally reach the bed Niall pushes him onto it. He climbs on top, running a curious hand down the firm line of Harry’s body, always tragically hidden under fake cashmere, until it reaches his flies. Harry has to break away to lie back on the pillow when Niall gets into his jeans, grasping onto the hard line of his cock.

Niall leans down to whisper in Harry’s ear, “I’ve been thinking about it ever since you first opened your mouth back in the bakery. You’re so uptight, and I can’t stop thinking about getting you to relax,”

He moves down Harry’s body, only stopping to press his mouth directly over the seam of his pants. Hot and wet and everything Harry’s ever dreamed of.

“Can I?” Niall asks, so politely.

Harry nods, and relaxes back into the mattress, closing his eyes and just letting himself feel instead.

**

Harry wakes up to a rustling in the room. Slowly he opens his eyes to Niall getting dressed. He’s stark naked with a towel hanging off his shoulder, and the light from Niall’s open bathroom door hits him just right to show off anything Harry’d want to see for the rest of his life.

“Hey,” Harry says lowly, half of his mouth still stifled by the pillow. Niall turns around and gives him a bright morning grin.

“What are you doing up so early?” he asks as he walks slowly back to the bed.

“You woke me up with all your clattering,”

“Sorry, but I’m a big boy who’s got to get to work. Bakeries don’t open themselves, you know,”

“Do you want me to come with you? You already know the amazing conversation skills I have on public transportation,”

“No! Go back to bed. I may have to get up at this hour but no one else on Earth should have to,”

“Fine,” Harry huffs as he rolls back to his side of the bed, “But don’t act like I didn’t ask,”

Niall chuckles behind him and runs a cold hand down his back. Harry can feel the bed dip as Niall lies beside him, pressing a kiss into the back of his head.

“You can come back tonight, if you want. I’ll still be here, as always,”

Harry turns to face him, “Okay,”

Niall leans forward to kiss him softly. Slow, sleepy, and sweet – just how Harry likes it.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” he asks, for some stupid reason.

“What?” he laughs, cupping Harry’s face, “Is the boss gonna yell at me?”

Harry lets him kiss him again, as if he would say no.

**

A miracle comes to Louis in the form of a small trip to the corner shop to pick up a pack of smokes and a bottle of Lucozade. And it’s not even thanks to Liam, that smug fuck.

He leaves the store and dreads returning to Liam in the studio, wondering where he can wander off to next, when a small child playing with a football knocks it into the gutter across the street. She runs out to get it and is promptly yelled at by her mother, but it clicks in Louis’s head. He’s figured it out. Harry Styles has got his death sentence.

**

Harry takes the 607 bus 12 stops, then the Circle line nine stops back towards the HMRC building. He sees people he’d worked with every day, continuing their lives as if he’d never been a part of them. Since getting his job he’d always considered it his forever job; dreamt of how he’d move up the ranks and the floors of the building until he was a senior auditor with two kids and a house in Surrey. Now he can’t imagine wanting to wake up without the smells of a bakery wafting through.

When the bus stops he gets off with everyone else, but instead of turning into the large and cold lobby of his building as he had done every work day for the past twelve months, one week, and one day, Harry continues straight and heads for the campus. He finds Zayn sitting in his office and listening to a show on the radio. He barely looks alive, much less awake.

“Hey, Zayn,” he says as he enters. It catches him off guard and he nearly falls off his chair, glaring at Harry as he beckons for him to come in, “So, Niall’s in love with me, I’m pretty sure,”

“Perfect! Who’s that again?”

“The baker! The one who this entire plot relied on; whether it was tragedy or comedy. I think he’s in love with me and the voice even confirmed it,”

Zayn stands up from his chair and goes over to his desk where it’s a mess of papers that he seemingly can still navigate, “Well, that’s great for your dick, much less great for my list,”

“List?” Harry walks over to join him, “What list?”

“I’ve been keeping a list of possible authors that could be narrating your life based on the details you’ve been giving me. Alive, male, British accent, and then all of the literary techniques, themes, and genres. Of course, considering the importance placed on Western male authors in the literary world the list’s quite long, but now that you’ve said that it’s all become null. I’ve got to start over,”

“Oh. I’m sorry?”

“Maybe it’s a good thing, maybe you’re going to live now,”

“Yeah, wouldn’t that be great?”

Harry smiles to himself, thinking for the first time in weeks that he could actually live to see the next month.  He imagines Niall in the fall, snug with a scarf wrapped around his neck as the two of them eat pumpkin-flavored things and drink cider. He imagines Niall in the winter, making snow angels on the ground with cheeks that are forever reddened by the chill and wind. He imagines Niall in the spring, picking fresh flowers to use in the bakery and breaking out the newest assortment of fruit pastries. And he imagines Niall in the summer, when it gets hot and they sit and drink lemonade in the park, thinking back to the year before when the two of them had just met, and how everything would have changed.

But then, in the silence of Zayn throwing away all of the papers he’s amassed on the subject of Harry’s possible narrators, Harry hears it.

“My next book is currently titled ‘Said to be Certain’, yes,” the voice says, and Harry knows it. As if the voice had been with him throughout his entire life, ever since he could remember, “I can’t tell you too much about it, and especially not the release date, but I can tell you it will include an awkward tax man, a charming baker, and a snarky timepiece. As well as other boring things like the intersectionality of mundanity and beauty, the uncertainty of the certain, and the importance of a well-kept wristwatch,”

Harry feels as if he’d been hit by a train and as if a weight had been lifted off his chest all at the same time.

“That’s it,” he says plainly, “That’s what we’ve been looking for,”

Zayn looks up at him, “What is? What are you talking about?”

“That man, the one who’s talking on the radio show, he’s the narrator. He’s the voice. I’ve never been so confident in my life,”

Zayn listens and it only takes a second for a look of recognition to go across his face.

“Oh dear. This is just horrible,”

“What? Why is this horrible?”

“That voice belongs to Louis Tomlinson. He’s one of the youngest and most revered authors of our generation. Beautiful and simple prose, you should feel honored that he’s writing about you,”

“Great, but what’s horrible?”

“Oh yes, well number one he wasn’t on my list so I was wrong. In my defense you never mentioned his vivid imagery and reliance on personification. Number two, his protagonists never survive,”

“What? What did you just say?”

“It’s what he’s known for. In the last few pages the protagonist always dies, even if it wasn’t hinted at during the course of the book. It’s become not a matter of who will die, but how and why. It’s genius, actually. I’ve been looking forward to the release of his latest novel for months. He’s taking long. I wonder why,”

All the hope, all the images and all the desires that had gone through Harry’s head about staying alive, and specifically staying alive _with Niall_ , leave immediately. He can barely process what to do next, as if he hadn’t already been preparing for his death for the past few weeks.

“You’re positive that the voice on the radio is the same as the one in your head?”

“Certainly,” Harry replies, clenching his fist unintentionally, “It’s the same person. I’ve been obsessing over this voice for what seems like forever, and _God_ even the summary sounds the same as my life,”

“Harry, I don’t know what else to say…”

“Do you think he lives here?” Harry interrupts, because finding him is more important than pity at the moment.

“Please, you can’t go looking for the guy…”

“He seemed to know a lot about London. He knew the bus lines, where they picked up, how many stops it took to get to the building. I’m certain he at least needs to be in London at the moment,”

“He writes tragedies, Harry!” Zayn nearly yells, “Even if you somehow could find him, how can you possibly explain this?”

“Why does it matter! I’m dying. No doctor can help me, no surgery, no prayers. I am in the hands of one human being, and what else do I have to do besides beg for my life?”

Harry rushes out of the room before Zayn can try and get him to change his mind, though he doesn’t know if it’s possible.

**

“Where have you been?” Liam asks when Louis finally makes it back. It took longer to return than Louis promised it would, but it took a good five minutes to recover from the shock of finally figuring out all of his problems, and ten minutes more to go to the pub downstairs and have a celebratory pint. Still, it’s better than Liam sitting up here by himself and setting up some useless brain-exercise activity like he’s been doing lately. There’re only so many times they can create a large model of Louis’s plot maps before Louis’ll want to trade places with Harry.

“I was getting smokes,” he says, “And Harry’s dead,”

That stops Liam in his tracks.

“What? How did you figure it out?”

“Although you’re likely to not believe it, I was not actually spouting shit when I said that all great literary plots come to me in the least-anticipated of times. Like in the deep end of a public pool, or stepping out from your local corner shop,”

“That easy?”

“It’s amazing I hadn’t come to it before. It’s simple but important, and should’ve been clear as day to me throughout the entire story. But I see it now. It was probably always there, in the back or side or interior of my mind, I just needed a little extra boost to help me. And not the type of boosts you’ve got, more like those that the bleach smells and air-conditioning chills from my local shop provide me,”

“And that’s it?” Liam gestures to the napkins Louis nabbed from the bar, “You’ve plotted it out on there?”

“Yes, it’s all here. Now, if you excuse me I’m going to go work this all out, and I’m sure that I’ll be finished before the end of the day,”

He turns and retreats to his writing office, more than giddy at the prospect of finishing his masterpiece, getting his publishers off his back, and getting Liam out of his space.

**

Harry walks into Jenneger Press, the small yet popular publishing company that Wikipedia had told him managed Louis Tomlinson. His page was impressive; Harry read it on the bus ride over.

The building it’s housed in is charming and old, tucked away in Camden in what he’s sure is a deceivingly large building designed to look quainter. There’s only one person in the lobby when he enters, the receptionist, and he’s ecstatic that he won’t have to try and explain it to her in front of many other people.

“Hi!” he says a little too excitedly, “I’m here to speak to Louis Tomlinson,”

“I’m sorry, who?” she says back. He looks down to see her name’s Marilena, he likes it.

“Louis Tomlinson, he’s an author here,”

“This is just office space, sir. Our writers do not have residence here. Would you like his fan mail address?”

“No, no, no, listen,” he leans into her space, hoping it comes across more like a secret and less scary, “I’m a character in his book,”

“Oh!” she says, disbelief evident in her voice, “Sir, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to-”

“Please, listen to me, I know it sounds impossible but he’s writing about me, possibly as we speak, and she’s going to _kill me_ ,”

Harry’s walked out of the door with two large, suited men following incredibly closely. They leave him alone once he’s across the threshold of the building, and he would take the time to be sad or have a panic attack about his impending doom, except the moment his foot hits the pavement it comes to him. The first time in his entire life that working at the HMRC has seemed worth it.

**

“Harry!” Priscilla calls out when he powerwalks past her, “What are you doing back so soon? You still have time left on your leave!”

He stops in his tracks, because he really has to explain himself or he’ll be escorted out for the second time in one day, “I’m just looking for Nick. Do you know where he is? I’ve locked myself out of our flat and he has the spare key,”

She points him in the direction of his cubicle (where else would he be?) and he finds him exactly there, watching videos of his favorite band in concert on the company computer. Harry’d be embarrassed for him but he’s got more pressing worries for the time being.

“Harry? What are you doing here?” Nick asks, pointedly not exiting out of the window. He has no shame; it’s kind of what Harry likes about him.

“I need you to see if we’ve done an audit on someone for me,”

“What? Harry, you need to-”

“Please, Nick! This is really important and urgent. Just trust me,”

“Okay, okay! Their name?”

“Louis Tomlinson,”

It takes a few moments for Nick to get everything together, but eventually it’s there. One Louis Tomlinson in all of little London who’s ever been audited. Nick prints off the contact information, and after Harry’s run across half the floor, dodging conversations with people who never bothered to talk to him before he became the office gossip, he returns to Nick’s desk to call the number he’s got.

“Wait, dude, the phones are down,”

“ _What?_ Okay, whatever, I’ll just use my cell,”

“But you never get service in here…”

“Oh my _God_ ,” he screams. He’s never hated the inability for the HMRC to run smoothly more, “Do you have any change?”

**                 

He exits the building and runs out onto the crowded sidewalk. And, of course, his moment of panic is when Louis decides to start inserting his annoying voice into his mind again.

_Harry ran with fervor through the path he had walked every day for twelve months, one week, and one day. Before he had tread it without excitement, entering work in the morning with droopy eyes and leaving at night with a bored mind. He had never bothered to pay attention to his surroundings beyond the people who would randomly run into him. Never had he noticed that the shrubbery along the edge bloomed red flowers in the month of June, or that a guitarist sometimes stationed himself there and played songs from the Rat Pack, or that there was only a singular phone booth anywhere close by._

_On this particular day, after Harry finally found it, it happened to be occupied by a man who only spoke Greek calling his brother in Islington, trying to get directions to his home. The man seemed to have an even worse grasp on directions than he did on English and seemed determined to understand his way completely before setting off. Not wanting to waste his time, Harry suddenly remembered a line of phone booths by a group of pubs a few blocks down._

_He ran. He ran faster than he remembered ever running before, zooming in and out of groups of people who dared to get in his way, before they finally came into view. The first of the booths had a broken door that refused to open, the second was covered in some colorful, sticky substance that Harry didn’t even want to look at, but the third was perfect. It was clean, had no smell that sometimes accompanied the little, red boxes that postcard manufacturers had an odd love for, and had no one in it. As Harry picked up the phone, the sweet dial tone instantly filled in his ear. It was so beautiful he could have cried, but he had things to do._

_He dialed the number that was hastily scribbled on his hand quickly on the phone and waited impatiently as he waited for the first ring._

_Finally, the phone rang._

**

Louis looks up from his spot in front of his computer to see the phone ringing its telltale tone. Odd, but he continues writing.

_The phone rang again._

Again, the phone rings, though the pause between the two rings seems unusually long. Liam even looks up at that, though he can’t know that Louis is writing what seems to be happening in front of him.

“Don’t answer that!” Louis yells as Liam moves to get it. It takes Liam by surprise, but he doesn’t really care, “Just don’t!”

Liam moves away, clearly thrilled he’ll be moving on to some author who enjoys his idiotic ideas more and wears socks more often than him. Good for Liam.

Once more, he decides to try it.

_For a third time, the phone rang_

No sound comes from the phone as he hovers his finger over the “.” key. But as soon as he presses it his fears come to life, and for the third time the phone rings.

He runs across the room at an impressive speed, leaping over an ottoman and pile of papers in his way. Though he has no idea what he’s to find on the other side of the phone line, he has to find out. Because it’s freaking him the fuck out.

“Hello?” he answers breathlessly.

A voice echoes from the other end, “Hi, is this Louis Tomlinson?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“I’m Harry Styles. I think you’re writing a book about me,”

“Oh my God,” Louis replies, in his head and to Harry. He’s never told anyone, not any reporter or any friends, about the protagonist of his new book. Only Liam knows, and he’s sure the publishing company has trapped him into a mean nondisclosure agreement, “You’ve got to be taking the piss outta me,”

“No,” Harry says, “I’m Harry Styles and I work for the HMRC. I’m in love with a blonde baker with freckles for days and I think that files sound like bed sheets flapping in the air when you rub them together. I count my brushstrokes, too, would you like me to tell you how many times up and down?”

Louis drops the phone which gathers Liam’s attention. He curls himself onto the chair by the phone, because it can’t be true. Because it’s impossible, and though Louis thinks highly of his writing skills he doesn’t consider himself a God – yet.

Through the other end of the line, from the phone lying on the floor, he hears a distant “Hello? Hello?”

**

Harry arrives at the door number given by a man noticeably not Louis – 1305. He knocks with an unsteady hand, though he has no idea what he has left to fear.

“Hello,” the person who answers says, “I’m Liam – Louis’s assistant,”

“Hi,” Harry says back, “I’m Harry. Louis’s going to kill me,”

He likes Liam. Liam has a nice smile and is kind. And is 80% less likely to kill him than the other person in this office.

Liam stands aside so Harry can enter, and he finds the space absolutely bare. He’d imagined an author’s writing area to be absolutely riddled with papers and knick-knacks and any signs of life, really. All that occupies this space, though, is a pack of cigarettes and large windows that look out over the skyline of London.

He rounds a corner and continues into another room where he finds a young man standing awkwardly with his hands clasped tightly behind his back. As soon as he sees Harry, his mouth goes wide and a choked sound comes out.

“You’re Harry Styles,” he says, so this must be Louis.

“I am,”

“No, you don’t need to tell me. I _know_. You’ve got Harry’s hair and his eyes and his sharp jaw and the birthmark on your wrist and the pigeon-toed feet. The soft sweater, the leather boots, the hints of tattoos that I can see even from here. You’re exactly Harry,”

“I’d hope so, I’ve been working on this character for going twenty-two and a half years now,”

Louis gives a small laugh before he brings his fist up to his mouth to bite on it, “How did you find me?”

“We audited you a few years ago and we’ve still got your contact information on file. I hope you don’t mind. It’s probably against company policy, but considering I’m about to die does it really matter if I die with a job or not?”

That takes Louis by surprise and he looks even more like he’s going to throw up than he did when Harry entered the room.

“Well, you already know that I’ve been hearing you narrate my life. At least I assume your secretary told you that,”

“Yes, my secretary did,”

“And I remember you specifically telling me ‘ _But little did he know, that this seemingly menial, everyday, boring task, would result in his impending death_ ,’”

“You remember the exact words?”

“I think anyone would remember their death sentence,”

Louis starts pacing around the room and Harry follows him. There’s a lot of nervous energy between the two of them and it’s not helping at all.

“This is strange,” Louis says, “This is absolutely the most mental thing I’ve ever heard. How did you not think you were going crazy?”

“I did, for a while. Or I thought someone had bugged my house and was speaking to me through there or something. But you knew everything. You knew what I did, my secrets, my inner-monologue. You knew that sometimes I get lost in my mind when I do the filing in the basement, all because I can’t get the sound of a sheet being pulled over me out of my head,”

Louis lowers his head into his hands, “Oh my God,”

“But now you won’t kill me, right? I know you want to, you’ve been talking about it for weeks, but…”

Louis’s head shoots up, “Oh no,”

“What do you mean ‘oh no’!”

“It’s just that!”

“Just what! Have you written it already?”

“Well,”

“You can’t kill me!”

“I haven’t written it! But I did outline it…”

“Why would you do that!”

“These are very abnormal circumstances!”

“Let him read it,” Liam says suddenly from the other side of the room. He’s got a bound stack of papers in his hands that Harry is sure is the manuscript.

He passes it to Harry who holds it in his hands, knowing that his life in his hands, and the decision on whether or not to end it is in Louis’s.

“Can I?” he asks.

Louis slinks back against the wall, head hitting the wood with a dull thud.

“Take your time,”

**

Harry finds Zayn in his office, where he always seems to be, reading over a large batch of papers that he seems to be not enjoying at all. He looks up when he hears Harry enter the room and they both stare at each other for a moment, as if Harry doesn’t want to talk about what’s in his hands and Zayn doesn’t want to ask.

“That’s it then?” Zayn motions to the manuscript, “You find Louis Tomlinson and got the story?”

“Yeah,”

“And have you read it?”

“I… tried so hard. But I can’t bring myself to knowing that once I finish it I’ll know how I’ll die,”

“So you want me to do it?”

“If you could,” Harry drops it on the desk, “Please,”

Zayn runs his fingers over the leather portfolio, slow and steady like he’s been given a gift.

“I should be done by tomorrow morning. I’ll tell you what I think then, okay?”

Harry nods and turns to leave before he remembers something.

“Oh, yeah. I told Mr. Tomlinson about you. He says he remembers your fan mail, since you’ve been there since the beginning. He looks forward to them every month. I just want you to know that,”

“Thanks,” Zayn say with a nod, “I truly appreciate it,”

**

That night as Harry stares up at the ceiling from Niall’s bed, he counts the tiles. Eighty-two in total, if you add together the halves along the edges and subtract the ones missing from the overhead lights. He lost track of time ages ago knowing that somewhere in the city Zayn is sitting and reading his life as it plays out in the novel. Zayn, somewhere, knows about Harry’s secrets, and soon the entire world will, too. Worst of all, though, is that Zayn will know how he dies before even Harry does. That should be the one luxury everyone’s allowed in life, shouldn’t it? To know our fate first.

Niall’s passed out beside him, soft and pretty in a pair of grey pants and a white vest. Harry likes that he has a space now. With his flat all but destroyed and his room at Nick’s more akin to a hotel than an actual home, it’s nice to be able to fall into Niall’s bed and feel like he belongs.

He likes to lay on Niall’s sofa with his blonde hair in his lap, to run his fingers through it until Niall is absolutely vibrating. He likes to kiss Niall slowly before dinner, and then again after. He likes to take Niall to bed, to press their bodies together until they’re both spent and satisfied. He likes to watch Niall fall asleep slowly, as he twists and turns underneath the sheets until he finally comes to rest on his side, facing Harry and with his hand too close to Harry’s body to be an accident.

He likes to listen to the soft breaths from Niall’s mouth, filing them away to calm himself when he panics. When he thinks about leaving Niall here, in bed, alone. With no one to appreciate how pretty his eyelashes look in the light from his nightlight, or how he craves human comfort at all times, even when dreaming. It’s what keeps him up at night, amongst other things.

**

Harry drags himself to a coffee shop that Zayn had emailed him the address of the night before. The morning could best be described as murky and dim. It isn’t holding out much hope for Harry.

Zayn is sitting in a table right in front of the windows in a shop that’s surprisingly busy for 8am on a Saturday. Or maybe just busy enough. Harry’s never really bothered to stop by one of these places. He takes a seat on a high stool across from Zayn, the manuscript placed perfectly in the middle of the two chairs.

“Would you like something to drink?” Zayn asks, “They’ve got this masala chai that reminds me a lot of some my grandma used to make when I was younger,”

“That’s alright. I’m really just here to talk,”

“Are you nervous?” he asks, like a small child who can’t keep his mouth shut.

“I’m just calm. Tell me what you think,”

Zayn seems quiet now, but not quiet in the way that he sometimes is. Sleepy and deep in thought and over-exerted. Now, in a loud coffee shop, he is nervous and barely wants to look Harry in the eye. He sighs and starts, trying to get this conversation out of the way.

“It’s possibly the best work Louis Tomlinson’s ever written. It’s evocative, creative, and meaningful. And I don’t feel like I’m over-exaggerating when I say that it might be one of the most important novels to come out of England this year, or even this decade. It has the possibility to change the landscape of the British novel,”

Harry sighs, “Sounds pretty great,”

“And it’d be an absolute piece of shit if you don’t die,”

“Fuck,” Harry growls out, “Are you really telling me to kill myself for this book?”

“Harry…”

“Maybe, maybe a few months ago I would’ve agreed. I would’ve looked at my life and said ‘Hey! I’m pretty sad! I’m lonely, I’ve lost touch with all my friends from uni, I’m going nowhere at my job, my family is long and gone, I get so lost in my mind that I forget to interact with the people around me and instead I distract myself with numbers. How bad would it be for me to die?’. But I was wrong! I have Niall now, and it just fucking started and I don’t want to let it go. I’m moving up in my career I’ve got actual responsibilities and they treat me like a real human. And, fuck, maybe it seems worthless but I’m learning the guitar! I’ve wanted to do that for years but I’ve been too stuck in my own little spot of okayness to ever do anything about it. Now I can! I’m actually on a fucking upturn in life, and (maybe not so amazingly) it only took the threat of me _having no life_ for that to happen!”

“I’m not telling you what to do, Harry,” Zayn says, finally looking him straight in the eye and putting more of an awake edge to his voice, “I just want you to read it. I can’t tell you what to do. I’m just a twenty-something postgraduate English professor. I took your plea on because you were interesting and I was bored, but I can’t be in charge of your fate. I can’t have that on my hands,”

Harry takes the manuscript from the center of the table, “Do you think he’ll listen to me? Mr. Tomlinson? Like if I read it and specifically ask to not be killed, do you think he’ll actually listen to my words?”

“Louis Tomlinson’s a weird little fella with a penchant of pissing interviewers off with his snarky answers and pissing fans off for not writing back to them and pissing his management team off by dismissing all of their help, but he’s not soulless, Harry. He’s a person,”

Harry takes a good, long look at the bindings that hold his past, present, and future.

“Would you say the masala chai’s calming?”

**

Underground, the grim skies and sticky weather of above turn into a gentle rocking on a train, soft flashes of lights from insides the tunnel that create a soothing effect when he closes his eyes. The car’s barely full with only a few other people on it: an older man letting his wife rest her head on his shoulder, a father with twin boys in matching tennis gear, a young woman with paint splattered all over her clothes and a satisfied look on her face, a baby girl who won’t stop staring at her.

Harry sits there and wonders about all of them, whether they’d give up their life for the sake of art, whether they’d fight to the end or give up in an instant. Would the older couple who’ve lived out everything they could’ve wanted in life still say no? Would the artist who dreamt of art and lived in art not want to die in art? Would it matter at all? Would they even have a say? 

He grabs the portfolio on his lap and undoes the string holding it all together. There aren’t many things he can control right now, but actually reading the damn thing is one of them. So he does.

**

“Mr. Tomlinson?” Liam calls out as he enters the office. Louis knows it’s a tip; couldn’t care less.

He can hear Liam’s dull footsteps echo throughout the space as he walks through. Finally, they come to a halt right above his head. Louis doesn’t want to open his eyes, but he does so anyways. It seems the mature and nice thing to do.

“Hello,” Liam says as Louis peaks his eyes open. Liam is standing upside-down over him, probably trying to figure out why Louis’s lying barefoot on his writing desk. He probably wouldn’t be able to figure it out; doesn’t have the imagination.

Louis sucks in a breath before speaking, “How many people have I killed?”

“You can’t-”

“How many?”

Liam doesn’t answer just tries (unsuccessfully) to pull Louis (gently) off the table.

“Ten,” Louis says plainly, “Ten people I’ve killed. Four novels, five short stories, and a poem from tenth grade. They all ended in deaths,”

“That can’t be-”

“Nina Vargas – an American high school student who gets diagnosed with leukemia a week into her freshman year. Spends the entire novel coming to terms with her mortality before dying in a school shooting at the end. Isaac Hara – a pilot who can’t sleep the night before his first flight as a certified pilot, whose plane falls apart on takeoff. Zellie Dawai… everyone was sure she wouldn’t die. Everything was looking up for her and they all thought that, maybe, she would be the turning point in my career. Died of an aneurism working underneath a fucking Volkswagen,”

“There’s no reason to believe they’d be real people,” Liam says immediately. His voice is soft and constrained, as if this is just another one of Louis’s freak-outs, just another day of putting up with the childish author with too much talent and not enough people skills. As if peoples’ lives haven’t been ruined by Louis already.

“Why would Harry be different?” Louis asks. He sits up on the table and swings his legs around to face Liam, “Why in the world would every other one of my protagonists be fictional, but Harry isn’t,”

“In what world does that make more sense than anything else that’s occurred?”

Louis doesn’t care, “They died for literature, Liam, without wanting to. They died for a fucking novel that’s currently on sale at Waterstones for ten quid. Their lives are only worth ten quid,”

**

It takes Harry a while to read his book, which he expects considering its size, but he can’t possibly put it down. The entire thing’s interesting enough without the added aspect of it actually _being_ _about him_. Everything in it is true and brings back rushes of emotions and memories. He falls into the easy feeling of the description of Niall in all his splendor, of the little bakery that he’s grown to view as a garden of hopes and dreams, and even his little intricacies seem important and defined now that they’re not just merely a figment of his imagination, bur something real and solid. Even his watch, the one that’s sat on his steadily on his wrist for well over a decade, comes alive with the right voice.

As he sits and reads for hours he watches the train change around him. The riders from early on leave immediately and are replaced at every stop. Some stops bring on enough passengers to force Harry to actually let someone sit beside him, and others clear out the entire car without anyone else getting on. He sees all the stops on the line countless times, again and again. The bricks and tiles and overhead lights of each melt seamlessly into the next. And the passengers change, too, from the light daywear with their umbrellas and fragrant coffees in the morning to the fancy dresses and overwrought accessories from those heading out early for a night on the town.

He finally stops, after so many go-arounds, on the stop closest to Louis’s building. He runs there in the hopes that he can still catch him, which he does, but only by a few moments.

“Mr. Tomlinson!” he yells, over and over until he can finally be heard and Louis turn around.

“Harry?” he whispers, looking pretty exhausted and worried, “Why are you here?”

“I’ve read the book,” he explains, “All in one go. I just sat on the train and read it. It was really good. I don’t read as much as I should, but I think I should know a good book when I see it and that… was breathtaking,”

“Thank you,”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about it, as I rode and afterwards, so don’t think I’m making a rash decision because I’m not. You should end it,”

“I can’t just-”

“I will die, Mr. Tomlinson. Someday, at some point in time, I will die. Whether by stroke when I’m already old and withered or in a freak accident that takes me by surprise, I will die. It’s inevitable. And… maybe this is the best way to do. I get to make closure in my life and spend my last night with the person I love. I think that’s what’s worst about death – that it comes when it’s unexpected and we don’t want it. I get to change that, don’t I?”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Louis admits.

“This is bigger than me and it’s bigger than you,” Harry shakes the manuscript to make his point, “It’s neither of our faults that this happened, that you created a character and he was real. You never wanted it to happen, and neither did I, but it did. Something… made this happen. And I can’t help feeling that it did for a reason. I wish it was later in my life, maybe after I’d gotten promoted a few times and had a few more nights with Niall, but I can’t imagine a better way to die than to be forever remembered in a beautiful work of art. Niall will move on with his life, someone else will get my promotions, and I’ll sit on the shelves of literature enthusiasts everywhere for as long as they’ll have me. And I think I’m okay with that,”

Harry hands off the manuscript to Louis’s shaky hands, “In the end, it’s up to you, but I won’t be upset by this death, I promise,”

He turns and runs off before Louis can call him back, before he can change his mind.

**

_The night before his death, Harry went about life as normal._

He returns to Nick’s apartment to find him gone, probably out with those hipster friends of his that Harry hates and envies in equal amounts. Back in his room he finds Niall’s audit and completes it, just a few finishing touches that should’ve happened ages ago but were put off due to the variety of reasons that his life is hectic now.

 _He wrote a few important letters_.

At the wooden kitchen table Harry writes out everything he has yet to say, and tries to hide its finality all the same. He doesn’t want to freak everyone out, sending them heartfelt letters the day before he dies, but they seem important.

Zayn’s is easiest since he knows it’s coming. It’s a simple letter just thanking him for his time, for his belief, for his knowledge and his strength. He doesn’t know where he’d be without Zayn. Probably stuck in his old flat with his old job with Niall only in his dreams and with a death coming that he didn’t expect. This is better, and he tells Zayn so.

Nick is next. He’s not the best friend Harry’s ever had in his life, but he’s been as much support as one could hope for during the past few weeks. Even when he thought Harry had gone off the deep end with the voices in his head, he still listened to him and treated him as if he weren’t broken. And when Harry came to the only person in London he knew well enough to actually ask to live at his place, Nick barely even blinked before opening his door. He sends him off an email saying he’s been digging around ticket sites and he’s found two tickets for one of the Both Ways concerts coming to London in the coming months for the two of them to use together.

Niall is last, because it’s the hardest. He wishes so badly he could just tell Niall to have someone to comfort him, to let him know that he loves him, but it would be unfair to unload something like this onto him. And even if he were to believe Harry, which would be amazing in and of itself, Niall’d most definitely tell him to not die, as any sane person probably would. So instead he writes a letter, mostly dramatic and emotional and full of as much fluff as he can pour into it, but it’s perfect. It’s the best ending and the best gift he could hope to give to Niall in the short amount of time he has left.

_And then he gathered a bag and went to Niall’s place, where they ate a dinner of Chinese takeout and a dessert of oatmeal raisin biscuits fresh from Niall’s oven, and watched reruns of an old television show Niall used to watch with his granddad back in Ireland._

_It was a fairly mundane evening, with the food arriving late and Harry accidentally dropping the plate of biscuits on the floor and the episodes they watched being from the show’s third season – arguably its worst. But Harry spent it by Niall’s side, cuddled together on his broken couch with the bright cushions and the warm afghan. Which made it nice enough._

_The only thing that really made this evening special, any different from the thousands that had preceded it in Harry’s life, was what would happen in the morning. But that would be the future, and this was the present, and the present was nice._

**

Niall tips his head back and knocks it against Harry’s shoulder behind him.

“Do you wanna go to bed?” he asks.

Harry frowns, “But it’s only,” and with a look down to his wrist, notices that his watch is long gone, “Arm hair o’clock,”

“What a coincidence!” Niall yells for how tired he claims to be, “That’s exactly my bed time,”

“Nooooo,” Harry protests, but Niall stands and drags him off the couch anyways. He even tries to jellify his bones so he won’t have to move, but Niall elbows him in the ribs and knocks him out of it.

“Let me just go wash the dishes and-”

“Can’t we just go to bed?” Harry whines.

“Not with dirty dishes we can’t!”

“Then I’ll do them,” Harry insists, “Go get ready for bed and I’ll speed through those dishes like a demon,”

“Fine,” Niall relents and backs towards his room, “but only because I need to remake the bed,”

Harry sends Niall off to his bedroom with a pat on the bum and makes his way back to the kitchen. It’s a nice little room that always seems to smell of cheese for some reason, but not in an entirely horrible way. More like a toastie or a freshly-made pizza. It only takes him a minute to rinse the fried rice off the plates they had used for dinner, but he stands at the sink and takes a few moments to himself just so he can gather his thoughts.

He walks back to Niall’s room and finds him angrily trying to the cases on his pillows. Instead of helping, like he should probably should, he crawls across the mattress and plops himself into the middle, starfishing out to cover as much space as possible.

“You wanker,” Niall yells, hitting Harry in the stomach with his half-covered pillow, “You could help, you know,”

Harry pouts, “But I did the dishes,”

“Oh, I forgot, your majesty, one couldn’t _possibly_ do both,”

Niall hits him again, and again and again and again until Harry can’t breathe from how hard he’s laughing. But just as quickly as they started, the swift barrage of pillows is replaced by a cool layer of synthetic cotton over his face. He opens his eyes and stares up into a blank field of off-white, until Niall lifts his arms and the sheet goes flying over his head. Niall giggles as he keeps parachuting it over Harry, laying it down gently only to rip it off a few seconds after Harry gets used to its comforting weight. He feels like he should be laughing too, but all he does is melt into the mattress and feel the relaxation flood through him. Finally, Niall lifts the sheet as high as his arms will take it, but before it’s able to fall he crawls onto the mattress next to Harry and curls around him; Harry grasping onto him as soon as he’s settled.

Niall nuzzles his neck, breathing in deep the smell of Harry’s cologne and the train he sat on for nine hours that day.

“You smell like Indian food,” he says simply, “And lavender,”

“Rude,” Harry scoffs, “You smell like farts and old leather,”

Niall chooses not to respond, and instead rolls himself onto Harry and kisses him some more. Harry saves them all up – the quick ones, the long ones, the deep ones, the impassioned ones.

“I have something to tell you,” Niall whispers as he pulls away.

Harry hums for him to go on.

“I’m absolutely mad for you,” he continues, dragging his hand down Harry’s chest as he goes along, “Never thought I could be like I am,”

Harry allows the words to seep into his mind and sink in before he says anything.

“I have something to tell you, too, and you need to listen carefully,” he says, looking Niall straight in the eyes and gulping audibly, “If you were to write off all the food you donate you’d surpass what you didn’t pay and-”

“ _Harry_ ,” Niall whines, pulling out the r’s ridiculously long, “The money’s not the point,”

“But it’d be less annoying,”

“Wasn’t that annoying. For me, anyways,”

“It’d be actually legal!”

“Is that not what anarchy is about?”

Harry gives him a look, “It’d keep you out of jail,”

“Fine,” Niall concedes, “But you have to promise to help me with my taxes next year,”

Harry smiles and pulls Niall in tighter, hoping to keep how he feels in this moment – happy, loved, needed – with him when he steps out the next morning.

**

Harry wakes up silently, before even Niall would to go to the bakery, and eases slowly out of bed. The only light in the room is the dim blue of his wristwatch and the lamppost from outside hardly making its way through the curtains. He tiptoes to the bathroom and brushes his teeth, looking himself over in the mirror before setting out the door.

He arrives back at his flat as the sun starts to turn the light grey London sky a bit more blue, a bit more lively, and bit more into the beginning of a new day. Outside the wall of his building looks the same as the day he left it: boring, brick, and with a giant hole in the middle where his living room wall used to be. It’s covered in plastic now, but at least adds a little flavor to where he called home for a year.

Upstairs he turns on the lights and sets the kettle on. Masala chai, as it turns out, is incredibly relaxing and Zayn bought him a box of teabags at the coffee shop. As a parting gift, he supposes. For the last time, he walks through his flat and takes it all in. There are the pillows he took from his mum’s house and the mugs stolen from the dining hall at uni. The walls are an awful off-white that look yellow at night and the carpets got stains left over from before Harry even moved in. And it’s as he runs his hands over the lacy curtains that he found a thrift shop a few months before that he starts to feel like he’s not even home at all.

He doesn’t have much time to think it over, though, as his wristwatch lights up with the start of a new day. Across town, in a council estate in Wandsworth, a nice woman named Peggy wakes up for her first full day as a city bus driver. A few streets over, Lily Harlow – aged eight and a half – wakes up for her final day of summer holiday. And in a lonely office space in the center of London itself, Louis Tomlinson takes his seat at his computer. In preparation for his day, Harry starts to get ready for work. He puts on one of his nicer pullovers and shaves his face. And for the last time, a voice rings clearly into his head.

**

_Harry’s life had changed over the course of the previous few weeks more than he had even realized. He was, of course, aware of the lack of importance he placed on his work, the additional importance he placed on his happiness, and his ability to brush his teeth without a single number entering his mind. But of all that alterations that had taken place in his life seemingly without his help, the most important was that of which he did not even know. On this day, the first time he would be returning to work since leaving it weeks before, Harry was not late for the 7:49 bus that he had to run to get to each work morning prior._

_On that Wednesday so many weeks before, Harry had received the wrong time from the gentleman standing next to him. His trusty wristwatch was, in fact, three minutes later than the true time, and as such he arrived at 7:46 on that particular day. There are, of course, worse things in the world than being off by three minutes. Most of the time._

_If it were not for that mistake, Harry would have ran into the open doors of the waiting 259 bus that had welcomed him in with warmth and standing-room only. Instead, Harry was able to relax and wait at the bus stop with the other people who usually arrived on time. He was able to finish his bran muffin_ _and stare up at the beautiful sky above him. And he was able to watch the bus advance, and out of the corner of his eye, catch the approach of a little girl, barely even eight and a half years old, fall off the sidewalk and into the path of the twenty tonnes of steel, glass, and people hurtling towards them. Harry barely had time to think before he was rushing out of his spot, grabbing the girl round her arm to throw her out of the way, and crunching distinctively into the front pane of the bus._

_In his last few moments of lucidity, Harry could hear people gasping, an older woman screaming that she hadn’t even seen him, and the sound of Niall’s laugh._

_Harry Styles was de_

“Fuck!” Louis screams as he slams his palm against his desk, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he repeats again, punctuating each word with another slap. He stares down at the computer in front of him in disdain, and then turns to stare out the window again. Thirteen stories up.

**

Zayn startles when he hears a knock at his door. He cancelled his classes for the day and feigned sick, choosing instead to stare out at the world around him. What he hadn’t expected was anyone to come looking for, and what he especially hadn’t expected was Louis Tomlinson.

“Excuse me,” Louis says as he opens the door, “Are you Zayn Malik?”

At the sound of the voice he’s been listening to in radio interviews and podcasts for years, Zayn immediately stands up and faces the door, “Yes, that’s me,” He runs his hands over shirt as if Louis Tomlinson, out of everyone in the world, would give a flying fuck whether or not he had forgotten to iron in the morning.

“Hi, my name’s Louis Tomlinson. I believe that,” he takes a large breath, “we may know someone in common,”

Zayn snaps out of his stupor and sets for his kettle, “Please, can I make you a cuppa?”

“No, no, I’m sorry, I’m only here to give you something,”

Louis walks to the table by the chair Zayn had just been sitting in and drops the manuscript in his hands onto it.

“Is that it?” Zayn motions to the book, though he knows it is. Has held it in his hands before and read all its secrets.

Louis stares down, failing to meet Zayn’s eyes, “Have you read it?”

He sighs, “Harry was… understandably afraid to read it at first,”

Louis nods and plays with the end of his pullover sleeves, hiding his hands in them, “I think, then, that you might be a little more interested in _this_ copy… particularly its new ending,”

**

Harry blinks his eyes open slowly to sterile white surrounding him completely. The first thing he realizes is that he can barely move, the second is that there is an inordinate amount of beeping and whirring running through his ears, the third is that he’s alive.

“Grrrrrr,” he grumbles, because he can’t really say much else. His throat is dry and his face hurts and the lights in the room seem too bright. Finally, he notices a doctor standing at the foot of his bed. She calls someone in that he can’t hear, and a nurse arrives to hook him up to things he doesn’t know. But he finds his throat feeling better and the rest of him feeling floaty. He tries to reach out and grab the doctor’s attention to ask her about a billion questions, but a heavy feeling falls over him and he’s asleep again before he knows it.

**

The second time he wakes up Harry barely feels like any time has passed, but the sun’s no longer shining through the window and the doctor by his side has been replaced with another. It’s been a few hours, but for Harry’s brain it’s been but a second.

“Hi,” Harry says weakly, garnering the attention of the man in the white coat.

“Hello, Mr. Styles. You’re finally awake, I see,”

Harry tries to stretch out his stiff body, but upon moving he notices he’s stuck. Literally. His entire body’s been bandaged and stuck in place.

“You’re lucky to be alive, you know that?” the doctor says. Harry does know that. He knows that more than even the doctor could know, “You did a pretty brave thing back there. Pretty stupid, but brave,”

Again, Harry would agree.

“How’s the kid?”

“Ah, young Lily Harlow. Eight and a half with two missing front teeth and curly, brown hair. She’s got a sprained wrist from the fall off the curb, but other than that she’s doing well. The Harlow family has expressed their gratitude and hopes to help you financially, if possible,”

“Great,” Harry says, trying to give a thumbs up. It doesn’t work that well.

“As for you” the doctor continues, “you’ve probably been in better shape. One broken arm, a few cracked ribs, a concussion, some internal bleeding that we’ve since been able to get under control-”

“I think I get it, thanks,”

“No, but one more thing. You should’ve died, Mr. Styles, and I truly don’t say this lightly. The only reason you didn’t is because your wristwatch shattered on impact and, though it did slice up your wrist a bit, it stopped the blood flow in a ruptured artery. Without that, you’d have bled out in minutes. And honestly, that doesn’t make sense. I’ve never heard of something like that happening. It’s like a scene out of a movie,”

Harry laughs, “Or a book,”

“Yes, that’s the same basic metaphor,”

The doctor’s probably about to tell him something really depressing or painful again, but he’s interrupted by a loud, booming, comforting voice echoing in from the hallway.

“Harry!” Niall yells, and Harry’s so so sure that the voice is his, “Harry, where are you!”

He’s entirely positive that the doctor is going to yell at Niall or make him leave considering he’s not family. Instead, he yells back, “Room 1017!”

Just as the doctor leaves, writing in more information on his little clipboard, Niall bounds into the room as breathless and breath-taking as ever.

“Oh my God,” he says, stopping short at the door with a big bag in his hands, “You’re such an idiot,”

Harry smiles, “Thanks,”

“A fucking bus, Harry, Christ,” Niall continues, walking over and bending down to meet Harry face-to-face.

“It was to save a little kid, if that’s any consolation at all,”

“Of course not. But look at you, your face is all bruised up,”

“Are you calling me ugly?”

Niall grabs Harry’s face between his hands and kisses Harry gently over his dressings.

“Of course not.”

He’s gentle with Harry, manoeuvring his arms so that he can hold him as tight as possible without upsetting any of Harry’s existing injuries. Not that Harry’d notice, he’s so drugged up he’s not sure he’s feeling anything at the moment.

“You idiot,” Niall repeats as he’s finally able to fold himself into Harry’s neck, “Don’t know what I would’ve done without you,”

Harry moulds his face into something that resembles a smile, “Probably get audited again,”

**

Zayn’s been quiet though he’s finished the book’s ending for a few minutes now. He takes his time thinking through his response – tracing his fingers over the words that have since changed Harry’s fate.

“It’s good,” he says finally.

“You’re lying,” Louis says back from the other chair, holding his second cup of tea.

“It’s okay,” Zayn relents, “It’s not fantastic, it’s not great, it’s not bad. It’s not this decade’s most revolutionary piece of fiction. It’s a fine work that will sit on the shelves of Waterstones proudly,”

Louis nods his head and shuffles his legs around to tuck them under himself, “I think… after all this time. Okay is exactly what I want,”

“The ending doesn’t really match, though, does it?”

“No, not really. But I can rewrite that, can’t I? My assistant’s going to go to the publisher and ask for an extension,”

“Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Louis shrugs, “I mean, I’ve been horrible to him since the moment he-”

“No, why did you decide to change the ending?”

Louis quiets for a second, something that Zayn’s not used to. Even when Zayn was reading over the last chapter of the book Louis was left rattling on about anything – from the X Factor to the new Vans he had just bought.

“I couldn’t do it,” he admits plainly, ‘There were a lot of reasons, but just, in every way, it seemed impossible to me,”

“Because Harry’s real?”

“Because… the Harry in the book does not know he’s about to die. He spends every second up until stepping off the curb believing that he’s going to survive the day, go home to Niall, and live the rest of his life out in peace and happiness. But Harry, our Harry, _knows_ , and he chooses not to stop it. Completely selflessly he gives himself up. That’s entirely different. The entire plot’s changed and you can’t just go through with that, you know,”

He drops his head between his shoulders, huffing out a large breath.

“And” he continues, “isn’t that someone you’d rather not kill?

**

“Eat another one,” Niall demands. He’s curled up next to Harry on the too-small bed with a pile of frosted blueberry biscuits laid out over Harry’s chest. To Harry, it feels as if they could be back in Niall’s flat with the lights dimmed and the smell of the biscuits freshly baked still wafting through the air. The hospital isn’t the ideal location for any of this to happen, but it’s a step in the right direction.

“Okay,” Harry breathes out. Niall smiles and takes another of the biscuits and feeds it to Harry, wiping crumbs off the corner of his lips with his thumb.

“I don’t even have to threaten you to get you to eat them anymore,”

 “Never again,” Harry promises, leaning forward so that Niall will kiss him. And Niall does, just like always.

“You know, when I left to buy some coffee before I ran into one of your doctors,”

“Are they giving me a patient of the year award?”

“No, those fuckers,” Niall continues, moving up to his forearms so it’s easier to look Harry straight in the face, “But, she was just telling me how you’ll have a few months of therapy even after you get out of here, and you’ll need a lot of support. And I’ve just been thinking that it’s too much to just drop on Nick, you know?”

Harry nods.

“So, I think, it would be better if you stayed with me? My schedule’s a little more flexible at the bakery and you could even come with me, you know. It’s just a thought. You don’t have to give an answer right now, yeah?”

Niall lies back down, and before Harry can give him enough time to overthink what he’s done, Harry leans forward with a stiff neck and kisses the top of Niall’s head.

“In what world would I say no?”

And finally, as the two of them lie there in there grinning separately in silence, Louis’s voice runs through his head clear as day. And finally, Harry smiles, and welcomes him back.

_It was as Harry was bound tight in his little cube of a hospital room, feeling Niall next to him draw shapes on his right arm dressing, that everything felt alright. Harry had lost himself previously to anxiety and loneliness, to work and mundanity, to accepting his time as fulfilling and his life as happy, when both were in fact neither._

_So he took time out of his day to thank God for frosted blueberry biscuits, for friends who take you in at your worst, for kind English professors who wish to see you at your best, for ceilings with an unknown amount of tiles, for little girls with missing front teeth, for bus drivers with fast reflexes, for soft touches from lovely bakers with blonde hair, for masala chai, for Both Ways, for cleaner-than-average phone booths, for audits, for filing rooms, for Gibson guitars and people who teach you to play them, for baking-themed puns and the romances they inspire, and, at least sometimes, okay pieces of fiction._

_And all of these, for how commonplace and boring they had seemed to Harry as he lived them out, all together seemed to unite for a cause much nobler, greater, and exciting than Harry could have ever dreamed. In many ways, they existed to save Harry’s life, and to make him start anew a life he thought he had lost._

_Which leads to how, remarkably, a wristwatch saved Harry Styles._

 

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: This fic talks about someone committing suicide, but it's in the vein of research for a novel and is never really considered (aka no one is actually suicidal). As for the main character death, there isn't one. There's a close call, but that's it.


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